Healthcare information technology (HIT) is transforming the healthcare industry and Siemens Medical Solutions (www.usa.siemens.com/healthcareit) is leading the way with Soarian® healthcare process management solutions such as its Soarian Clinical and Financial suites. Using Soarian, Siemens customers are rethinking, redefining, and reinventing processes with an industry-leading workflow engine that simultaneously pushes multiple tasks to multiple people — across care settings, departments, and disciplines — so information is available when and where it’s needed.
According to a recent report by the Gartner Group, the No. 1 business priority for chief information officers (CIOs) globally is Business Process Management: linking business goals with IT-enabled process improvements. Furthermore, healthcare CIOs plan to make the investments needed to put these improvements within reach. According to Health Data Management’s 2006 CIO Survey, 77 percent of the CIOs who participated in the survey said that they expect their organizations’ IT budgets to increase in 2007. When asked why, they cited the need for better access to information, an increase in the quality of care, and a reduction in medical errors.
At its core, healthcare is a team-based business with each player fulfilling his or her specific role. This calls for extensive communication and coordination, which until now was a manual task. Coordination of care is performed through personal communication, phone calls, and maintaining paper records — making it prone to delays, omissions, and errors, especially when many team members are involved.
As the new-generation Siemens HIT solution, Soarian software’s core differentiator is its use of a powerful workflow engine that facilitates and tracks technology-driven “workflows” designed to help our customers increase efficiency, improve on patient safety initiatives, and achieve desired clinical and financial outcomes — while supporting key quality and regulatory initiatives. Siemens has pioneered the use of workflow technology in the healthcare sector. With the quest for safe, efficient, and superior patient care at the heart of every healthcare organization, Soarian helps facilitate more informed decision-making and more efficient business practices. To reach its goals, Siemens is collaborating with customers to:
Design efficient healthcare processes using a proven process modeling environment,
Automate the transfer of information with an industry-leading workflow engine,
Monitor processes seamlessly with embedded analytics for Business Activity Monitoring built into the system, and
Deliver the benefits of healthcare process management throughout an organization with the capabilities provided by Service-Oriented Architecture.
All four — process modeling, workflow engine, business activity monitoring, and service-oriented architecture — are essential for effective healthcare process management and only Soarian contains them all.
“Information technology is transforming healthcare, providing greater transparency and establishing quality-of-care benchmarks that evolve into industry standards,” explained Janet Dillione, president, Health Services, Siemens Medical Solutions Healthcare IT Division. “Our goal is to help our customers optimize healthcare outcomes and increase efficiency by establishing consistent healthcare process management that drives clinical and financial success.”
With an influx of new and expanding customer engagements for Soarian, Siemens is helping an increasing number of healthcare institutions move toward greater adoption of HIT to increase workflow efficiency and help providers focus on patient safety initiatives, improve the patient healthcare experience, and advance healthcare outcomes. St. Luke’s Health System, Idaho’s largest healthcare provider, recently chose Soarian solutions to assist with clinical documentation for its Children’s and Heart Hospitals. In addition to purchasing Soarian Clinicals, St. Luke’s has purchased and plans to implement Soarian solutions including Critical Care, Cardiology and Scheduling, as well as Siemens Decision Support and Contract Management solutions, and components of the syngo® Suite, Siemens integrated RIS/PACS solution, which connects seamlessly with the clinical and administrative cycles addressed by Soarian.
“Following the merger of St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center and Magic Valley Regional Medical Center, my team and I were asked to evaluate a go-forward healthcare IT strategy for the newly formed health system,” explained Sheryl Bell, director, Information Technology, St. Luke’s Health System. “Upon evaluating the status of our current health information systems and best-of-breed IT efforts, we recognized that integration needed to be a primary goal of our organization. We have experienced benefits from Siemens technologies and felt that Soarian was the strongest solution to help us move in a new direction toward true enterprise-wide integration, especially due to its unique workflow engine.”
Today, nearly 150 Soarian implementations are occurring around the world. Soarian-driven workflows are being deployed globally to support key quality and regulatory initiatives such as those defined by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Joint Commission (JC) Core Measures, the six key objectives of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) 100,000 Lives Campaign, and providers’ own internal quality measures. Currently, more than 50 Soarian-enabled workflows are live across the Siemens customer base, demonstrating the ability to seamlessly connect clinical, operational, and financial processes in support of patient-centered care. Examples include workflows to:
Identify patients at risk for deep vein thrombosis (DVT),
Better manage patients on heparin therapy,
Better manage bed utilization,
Identify early and manage patients with isolation-requiring infections,
Deliver evidence-based care to Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI), chronic heart failure (CHF), Diabetes and Community-Acquired Pneumonia patients,
Reduce risk of negative drug interactions by reconciling medications on transfer patients,
Coordinate care of IV site management, according to hospital best practice guidelines, and
Better manage patients at risk for falling in the hospital.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), infections, such as Methicillin Resistant Staphylcoccus Aureus (MRSA) and other drug-resistant infections, acquired in hospitals kill some 90,000 patients a year and cost the healthcare system $4.5 billion. At The Chester County Hospital (TCCH), West Chester, Pa., it was found that four percent of adult patients entering the hospital have a history of MRSA, accounting for eight percent of patient days. Before TCCH began using Soarian, the hospital estimated that nursing was unaware of a patient’s positive history of MRSA status up to 25 percent of the time. Since TCCH went live on a Soarian-enabled infection control/isolation workflow, nursing now receives notification on 100 percent of all known MRSA patients.
The Soarian-enabled infection control/isolation workflow has had a positive impact on TCCH’s ability to more quickly and effectively treat patients, while better managing bed utilization. Early identification of patients with infections that require isolation, and fast implementation of an isolation protocol, has reduced the risk of additional patients and staff being exposed, decreased inappropriate patient bed assignment, and improved detection of negative screens to expedite removal of a patient from a high-cost isolation bed.
For its ground-breaking use of healthcare process management technology, TCCH was recently named the 2006 Gold Winner for the North American Global Excellence in Business Process Management and Workflow Award, acknowledging the positive impact on both clinical and business outcomes that the hospital has achieved through HIT, specifically in the areas of bed management and infection control.
“We realized that healthcare process management was one of the keys to the survival of a healthcare system in the 21st century,” Ray Hess, vice president, Information Management, TCCH. “The Chester County Hospital system upholds the fundamental principles of medicine — the desire to make people well, and to do so in the safest, most effective way possible.”
About Siemens Medical Solutions
Siemens Medical Solutions of Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) is one of the world’s largest suppliers to the healthcare industry. The company is known for bringing together innovative medical technologies, healthcare information systems, management consulting, and support services, to help customers achieve tangible, sustainable, clinical and financial outcomes. Recent acquisitions in the area of in-vitro diagnostics — such as Diagnostic Products Corporation and Bayer Diagnostics — mark a significant milestone for Siemens as it becomes the first full service diagnostics company. Employing more than 41,000 people worldwide and operating in over 130 countries, Siemens Medical Solutions reported sales of 8.23 billion EUR, orders of 9.33 billion EUR and group profit of 1.06 billion EUR for fiscal 2006 (Sept. 30). Further information can be found by visiting www.siemens.com/medical.
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