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Tuesday, 15 July 2014

New Hospital Operating System solution from StatCom launched


StatCom, a developer of innovative healthcare software, announced today availability of its Hospital Operating System™ solution, a comprehensive patient throughput solution. The hospital-wide operating system was developed to enable hospitals to achieve maximum operational performance and substantial reductions in Average Length of Stay (ALOS), while greatly enhancing the patient and staff experience. Actions across the hospital are prioritized, allowing patients to flow at their best possible rate with respect to service, quality, safety and resource consumption.

By optimizing the whole facility, StatCom helps hospitals achieve a significant competitive advantage by increasing bed turns, accelerating discharges and reducing diverts and delayed cases—directly impacting healthcare costs. The majority of hospitals have clinical and financial systems, as well as departmental solutions, but they do not have an operating system that is able to track and manage all cross-vertical patient flow logistics in real-time.
“The StatCom solution is a huge step forward in helping Mercy Health Partners (MHP) facilities, such as Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, improve patient flow and reduce inherent delays in the patient care process,” said Samantha M. Platzke, senior vice president and chief financial and transformation officer with MHP. “Mercy St. Vincent has reduced their average length of stay by 14% and their direct expenses by $8.6 million in just 12 months.”

StatCom’s Hospital Operating System solution enables hospitals to orchestrate cross-departmental flow for all patients simultaneously and manage the unplanned variables in daily resource availability and patient census. This represents a shift in thinking from:
  • Silo driven data to hospital-wide information on patient flow across verticals
  • Optimizing parts to optimizing the whole
  • Anecdote and opinion to effective fact based decisions
  • Low coordination and collaboration to orchestrated care execution
  • Uncertain service delivery to more predictable service performance
“Our continued growth, despite the economic climate, emphasizes the need that hospitals have to maximize existing capacity and resources by being more efficient,” said Ben Sawyer, executive vice president Client Services for StatCom. “Our customers needed a dramatic increase in efficiency that existing bed management offerings can’t provide. We designed the StatCom solution to deliver ‘game changing’ reductions in length of stay by substantially increasing the efficiency of patient flow, systems and information.”


StatCom launches its Hospital Operating System


Hospitals don’t always know where their patients are – a situation that can prove costly in both financial and clinical terms. With that in mind, StatCom has launched a technology platform designed to give providers a complete view of the patient from admission to discharge.
The Hospital Operating System, unveiled Monday by the Atlanta-based subsidiary of Jackson Healthcare, “is the missing gear that will keep everything in the hospital running smoothly,” said Bob Schlotman, the company’s vice president of marketing.
“Hospitals today are silos of information that aren’t always connected,” he said. “What StatCom does is kind of layer a horizontal view of administration … synchronizing the delivery of healthcare in the hospital.”
Company officials describe the Hospital Operating System is an administrative tool that doesn’t store data, but compiles it for a real-time view of all clinical and financial systems. According to Schlotman, the platform “replaces whiteboards, greaseboards and bedboards that just tell you where the patient is going to be sleeping tonight, not where the patient is now.”

“We’re trying to eliminate a lot of phone calls,” he added.
The system has proven effective at Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio, part of the Mercy Health Partnersnetwork. Hospital officials say the technology, in use for the past year at Mercy St. Vincent and more recently rolled out to other hospitals in the system, has helped reduce the time a patient needs to stay in the hospital, thereby reducing expenses for both the hospital and the patient, as well as helping to improve the quality of care by making sure treatment is delivered to the patient in a timely and effective manner.
“The StatCom solution is a huge step forward in helping Mercy Health Partners facilities, such as Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, improve patient flow and reduce inherent delays in the patient care process,” said Samantha M. Platzke, MHP’s senior vice president and chief financial and transformation officer. “Mercy St. Vincent has reduced their average length of stay by 14 percent and their direct expenses by $8.6 million in just 12 months.”

Schlotman said the Hospital Operating System is a broad, enterprise-wide platform designed to accommodate as many users as possible, with information displayed on a real-time dashboard for administrative use. Access is determined by administration, and the system can be implemented in parts in as little as four months or as whole in about six months.
The system is designed for hospitals with 300 beds or more, with hundreds of users and an average length of stay of five days. Schlotman said StatCom is working on enhancing the system to manage patient milestones and alerts, and future versions might incorporate staffing and supply chain services as well as the operating room and emergency departments

Hospital OS

Hospital OS is a research and development project for a hospital management software to support small hospitals. It is financially supported by the Thailand Research Fund and released under the GNU GPL.
With the effort to facilitate the hospitals in the remote areas where technology seems to face difficulties to reach, we have designed and developed the hospital information system called "Hospital OS". This software is an open source program aimed to provide efficient medical service and hospital management. Despite the lack of budget and technological advance in rural communities, the developers endeavor to create the effective information system together with proficient people and aim to build a sustainable development to every community in Thailand.
Hospital OS is implemented in 95 small rural hospitals and 402 health centres serving at least 5 million patients
Hospital Operating System™: Reliability Through Logistics
We partner with hospitals to establish a logistical control system that dramatically improves care and throughput
Care Logistics partners with hospitals to provide the only logistical control system for patient throughput and care delivery. It combines breakthrough approaches to care coordination and  throughput efficiency with innovative hospital logistics software. The result: Reliable and predictable operations that dramatically improve patient throughput, care quality and experience.
How does it work? The Care Logistics Logistical Control System orchestrates every activity and milestone of patient care with the greatest efficiently. Consider the logistics that delivery companies use to ensure that your package arrives on time, or that manufacturers use to deliver the right number of quality products exactly when they're needed. The same principles apply and succeed robustly in hospital care coordination. It's a new concept for many hospitals, but when they see the results in action, they embrace it.
Patients are where they're expected to be for timely treatments and services. People and resources are available exactly when needed to advance the patient's care plan. Beds and rooms are ready when they're supposed to be. Transport is on time. Everyone can see the statuses of patients and orders at all times. Both caregivers and patients have a clear and reliable agenda for care. Departments work in harmony, not in isolation and conflict. And hospital executives have accurate, updated information they can act on quickly to make sure everyone has what they need to provide prompt, quality care.

Waiting to Wait Some More

"Why the pursuit of No Wait States" is Essential

Patients wait to be admitted.  Doctors wait for test results.  Patients wait for treatment.  Rooms wait to be cleaned.  Nurses wait for doctors.  Doctors wait for equipment.  Patients wait for transport.  Families wait for news. Patients wait to be discharged.  Everyone waits for someone or something.
Waiting is pervasive in 
healthcare
 today.  A bird’s eye view of care delivery in most hospitals might resemble the start-stop quality of our nation’s busiest expressways:  discrete instances of productive movement (a patient is triaged, a bed is filled, labs arrive, a nurse gives medication instructions, surgery begins) separated by lengthy “wait states” in which value-add activities come to halt as the operational systems grind, trying to keep pace with demand.
Waiting is symptomatic of not only the complexity of care delivery, but also the complex processes and disparate systems used to coordinate that care.  Too often, wait states have become the status quo to the frustration of patients, physicians, nurses, and administrators.


Top Open Source Medical Billing and EMR Software

As the open source community continues to grow and thrive through the popularity of such enterprise ready platforms as Red Hat, the number of open sourcemedical applications also grows with it. The truth is, medical software is expensive. Most health care providers – doctors, hospitals, dentists, independent clinics – have been under a lot of pressure to maintain or reduce run costs while at the same time continuing to provide the quality patient care and customer service expected of the medical care industry. In an effort to control these costs, many health care organizations are looking toward open source software to help them manage their complex billing and electronic medical records. This is an especially hot topic with the United States government mandating that health care providers move from a paper based system to a primary electronic medical record system over the next two years, complete with short term financial incentives in the form of government refunds for early compliance and hefty fines for late adopters.

FreeMED

With its long history of providing free open source electronic medical record software, FreeMED is one of the most advanced and mature EMR tools available in the industry today. A really nice feature is the ability to purchase commercial support licenses for FreeMED. In some ways, it seems like a nice middle ground for users who want to utilize open source tools, but do not have the ability to provide all of the technical support on their own that is inherent in open source products.
Features include:
  • Web based interface
  • Stores and represents its medical data as a group of “modules”, which consist of a database model and a user interfaces
  • Uses external billing software called REMITT (REMITT Electronic Medical Record Information Translation and Transmission)
  • Printing system
  • Patient scheduling
  • PDF form templating
  • HL7 interface
  • XML-RPC web services
  • Extensible, modular architecture
  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant
  • Translations includig French, German and Japanese

OpenEMR

OpenEMR is another solid open source electronic medical record application. It is developed and maintained by the not for profit OEMR group. It features billing, scheduling and practice management functionality along with fully integrated electronic medical records management. Like FreeMED, OpenEMR also provides the option to purchase commercial support licensing through the OEMR group.
Major features of OpenEMR
  • Multilanguage Support
  • Electronic Billing (includes Medicare)
  • Document management
  • Integrated practice management
  • E-Prescribing
  • Insurance tracking (3 insurances)
  • Easy to customize
  • Easy Installation
  • Voice recognition ready (MS Windows Operating Systems)
  • Web based (Secure access with SSL certificates)
  • Integration with external general accounting program SQL-Ledger
  • Built in Scheduler
  • Multi-facility capable
  • Prescriptions by printed script, fax or email

OpenEMR Virtual Appliance

The OpenEMR Virtual Appliance is a subset of the OpenEMR suite, and provides medical record management, scheduling, insurance billing, prescription management, accounting and several other features. This virtual appliance can run on any operating system, as long as it supports the Free VMware Player.
There is a Demo available online to see what it can do.
This is a fully functional demo, which allows you to play around with all the software packages in the appliance. Some simple configuration has been added for clearer demonstration of OpenEMR, 
medical billing
, accounting, and access controls.

FreeB

The FreeB medical billing product has been around for several years, and seems to be in a state of flux right now. It is a Perl based tool that enjoyed some popularity some years back and may see a resurgence in popularity with the new EMR mandates from the government

SmartCare

SmartCare is an internationally distributed electronic medical records tool that was developed by the government of Zambia. It is currently widely used in Zambia, Ethiopia and South Africa. This system was built to support clinics that need to interface internationally, but also have co-existing paper based systems. It is also built around the assumption that many of the clinics may not have ubiquitous access to telecom systems or even reliable electrical power.
Smartcare Features:
Distributed database system: Given resource constraints in developing countries such as Zambia where electricity is still not available in some parts of the nation, having Internet access throughout the nation will take many more year. SmartCare data is held at each facility in a distributed design; unlike centralized designs of most systems. Internet is not essential, merely an added benefit.
Smart Card: SmartCare uses client carried smart cards or staff carried flash drives for a lower-tech connectivity solution that works today. An individual’s health information is stored on a very compressed, secure smart card to maintain continuity of care between visits, health services and health facilities. The individual’s health record is also stored on the health facility installation database for backup and generation of facility level and health management information systemreports.
Touchscreen: Making the data capture task bearable can be the most challenging part of EHR design. SmartCare extends a successful Malawi idea, where touchscreen data entry by existing staff lowers this barrier. The software works well with a touch screen monitor enabling the clinician to view and record patient data.
GIS data visualization: Aggregate health data stored at health facilities can be visualized in GIS maps. This includes live patient data as well as static data from health surveys.

XChart

XChart is an XML based open source electronic medical record management developed and maintained by the Open HealthCare Group.
The Open Healthcare Group wants to create a community of people who share the goal of improving clinical care. This community will be able to freely use our health record, X-Chart. This maximizes everyone’s access to the Open Healthcare Group technology.
The stated purpose of the software is to create an electronic system that is easier to use than paper based systems, which they admit are extremely ubiquitous because of the ease of use over most electronic systems.

ClearHealth

Clear Health is a very popular open source electronic medical record application, used by a number of large institutions, including the Primary Care Coalition network out of Maryland, USA.
Written in the PHP language and capable of running on most server configurations, Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, under Apache and MySQL (LAMP), ClearHealth is compliant with the expectations of most Open Source web-based systems.
ClearHealth is a comprehensive practice management and EMR system incorporating the key categories of functionality for scheduling, patient registration, electronic medical records and CPOE, electronic and paper billing, and SQL reporting. As an open source reference implementation of several interoperability protocols, ClearHealth has support for working with data in HL7 and Continuity of Care Record (CCR) formats.

50 Open Source Replacements for Health Care Software



50 Open Source Replacements for Health Care Software

According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers Study, 79 percent of health care executives anticipate an increase on their technology spending this year. With "Meaningful Use" considerations weighing heavily on the industry, many will beinvesting in or upgrading their electronic health record (EHR) capabilities. And quite a few organizations will also be looking to analytics and other IT initiatives that could help them reduce costs or improve patient care.
However, expensive, proprietary software isn't the only option for these sorts of initiatives. The open source community has a wealth of projects related to EHR, imaging, and hospital, laboratory and practice management. Small practices and facilities in developing countries, in particular, have found that these applications met their needs while minimizing their expenses. We've put together a list of fifty of these applications and noted proprietary applications they resemble.
As always, if you know of additional open source healthcare software that we should have included on our list, please note it in the comments section below.

Electronic Health Records (EHR)

Designed by a physician, this EHR is designed to be very, very easy to use. Although the software itself is free and open source, note that it is a FileMaker template, so you will need FileMaker (which is paid, proprietary software) in order to run it. Operating SystemWindows, Linux, OS X
2. FreeMED
Under development since 1999, FreeMED is a mature Web-based application that combines EHR capabilities with a practice management system. Asian users can get commercial support through a company called B-Mas; for U.S. users, a very active community provides support. Operating System: Linux
3. GNUmed
This project aims at helping medical providers "better document, understand, plan, and manage their patients' health and health care delivery." It's been translated into multiple languages, and the website includes success stories from practitioners who have used it in several different countries. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
4. GaiaEHR
This Web-based EHR and practice management solution boasts a modern, intuitive interface. See it in action with the online demo. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
An official GNU project, this award-winning application combines EMR functionality with a hospital information system and a health information system. It was designed to comply with industry standards, and it's been adopted by the United Nations University. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
6. HOSxP
Short for "hospital and experience," HOSxP is a hospital information system that includes EHR capabilities. Like Hospital OS (see below) it's used by many health care facilities in Thailand, but it is a separate project from Hospital OS. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
7. M
Also known as "Mountain Meadow Medical Records," M is an EMR program that a practice in Virginia has been using for a decade. It offers an intuitive interface and fast performance. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
8. MEDILIG
This "Medical Life Guard," is a free, collaborative EHR platform. It tracks admissions, visits, demographics, history, operations, labs and much more. Operating System: Windows
9. OpenEMR
Certified by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health 
Information Technology
, OpenEMR boasts that it is "one of the most popular open source electronic medical records in use today." Commercial support is available through third-party partners. Operating System: Windows, Linux

10. OpenMRS
OpenMRS began as a project to fix the medical record system at a clinic in Kenya and has grown into a leading open source medical record system used around the world, particularly in developing countries. It describes itself as "both just a library of API calls and a database and a default implementation of those API calls in the form of a web application." Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
11. OpenVista
Owned by Medsphere, Open Vista is the open source version of the Veterans Administration's VISTA EHR system. Because the technology has already been used extensively at more than 1500 VA facilities, it's one of the more mature and usable open source EHR's, and users say it compares very favorably with proprietary solutions. Operating System: Windows, Linux
Replaces NextGen Software, AdvancedMD EHR+PM, MediTouch EHR, Waiting Room Solutions,Greenway PrimeSUITE, EpicCare EMR, Meditech
Supported by McMaster University, the OSCAR EMR is used to support more than 1.5 million patients across Canada. It includes scheduling, e-charting, prescribing, billing, lab downloadschronic disease management, disease registry, customizable forms and other capabilities that can be accessed via any Web browser. Operating System: Windows, Linux
13. PatientOS
Designed to be user friendly and to fit physician workflowsPatientOS is a modular, customizable EMR system. Commercial support is available through regional partners. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X
PHYAURA incorporates EHR capabilities with basic practice management capabilities, and it's ONC-certified. Paid editions add more functionality and support, and it's also available in a hosted version. Operating System: Windows
15. THIRRA
Short for "Telehealth and Health Informatics in Rural & Remote Areas," THIRRA is an IDRC-funded project that provides EHR capabilities and also allows government officials to track outbreaks of infectious diseases. It's currently being used in Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Operating System: Windows, Linux

Helping African hospitals with open source software




The daily management and operation of a hospital requires enormous effort. These days, most hospitals utilize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to centralize facility operations including inventory, budgets, invoicing, and employee management. Any hospital administrator will tell you that ERP software is essential to efficiently managing their hospital as the software lowers inventory costs and improves efficiencies and quality.
Unfortunately, most hospitals in Africa do not have the financial means to purchase expensive ERP software systems. Enter Tim Schofield, an open source software developer and project leader on an open source ERP project called "KwaMoja." We had the 
opportunity
 to talk with Tim and discuss his efforts to develop and implement KwaMoja in African hospitals. We had a great conversation that also looked at how open source ERPs can create more self-sufficient African businesses that can be more competitive and be less reliant on other nations.

Tim, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. Tell us about KwaMoja, the open source software project you are working on?


To properly tell you about KwaMoja, I have to go back on some history. KwaMoja is a fork of the webERP project, which is an open source general purposeaccounting/order processinginventory management system. I have worked on that project for many years, and in 2008 I was asked by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania to go and help them adapt webERP to be used in one of their biggest hospitals. The project involved linking with an open source healthinformation system called care2x. I fell in love with East Africa and its people, and at the end of the Haydom project I stayed on and looked for similar projects to work on.

Fast forward a few years and I was asked to run a course at a college in Kenya. I decided that the basis of that course would be writing some extensions to webERP. This went well and at the end of the course a group of students wanted to carry the work on. At the time, the webERP project was being torn apart by arguments and bad feelings—unfortunately this happens all too often in open source projects—so I suggested that they take the webERP code and do what is called a "fork". In other words take a perfectly legal copy of the work, and branch off in a new direction.
The term KwaMoja comes from Kiswahili, the dominant language in both Kenya and Tanzania. Literally "kwa moja" means "for one" and is intended to refer to the integrated nature of the software, and a sense of unity given the problems with webERP at the time. Thus KwaMoja was born.

What is open source hospital management software?


"Open source" is also known as free software. It is built by a community of developers that anybody can join. "Free" means it is free from any restrictions. It is available for anybody to take, adapt to their needs, and use. All that is demanded from the license is that when people adapt and improve the software, those adaptations are offered back to the community, helping the software get better.
Many of the users that we help are at hospitals where we link KwaMoja with care2x. Our current project is to merge care2x into KwaMoja, to create a completely integrated system that can work in any hospital. This project is currently called Project Mtuha, though the name will probably change at some point.

How can these open source programs benefit Africans?


Firstly hospitals in Africa cannot afford the commercial ICT systems we use in western hospitals. To put some perspective on the financials, Haydom hospital in Tanzania mentioned above is a 400-bed hospital (often with more than one patient per bed) and costs $6 million a year to run. Picking a western hospital at random, the University Hospital of Kansas is a 600-bed hospital and has an annual revenue of $1.1 billion in 2013. Open source enables hospitals in Africa to get state of the art software at a price they can afford.
Unfortunately, hospitals in East Africa suffer from the great disease of corruption. Our system enables management and donors to keep a close control of what is going on in the hospital, even when the donors are on a different continent. We have seen some significant reductions in money leaking from the hospitals, and this in turn means the money can be spent on patient care.

What stage is the project in?


KwaMoja is working and is already used in many organizations. As with all these projects it will never be complete: there will always be new features to be added, and that's most of the fun!
Project Mtuha is still in the early stages. We urgently need more funding to employ some African developers to work on it. At the moment it is moving, but moving slowly.

Where and how have you gained support for these projects?

We have a large following on social media, mainly on Twitter and LinkedIn, but in a smaller way on Google+ and Facebook as well. I write regular articles and blog posts promoting our work. I speak to all the faith organizations who run hospitals in East Africa.

What is the implementation and roll out strategy for these projects?

Commercial ERP vendors in East Africa (e.g., SAP or Microsoft Dynamics) charge $500 or more a day for their consultancy services, on top of software licenses that generally cost more than $1,500 per user, and then this money goes out of the country back to the west.
Africa has a huge amount of talent and my dream is to harness this talent and recruit a network of independent consultants throughout Africa who can sell services around the project, keeping the money in Africa. The software comes to them free. They don't pay licenses to multi-nationals, but instead just charge for their own skills. This will bring the huge benefits of the software to African organizations.

What are the biggest challenges you face?

The three biggest challenges are money, money, and money! We are constantly held back by lack of resources. Project Mtuha would be complete by now if we could employ local developers to build the system.