Customer Solution Case Study
/ Solution Increases Operational Efficiency for ChangiGeneralHospital
Overview
Country or Region:Singapore
Industry:Healthcare
Customer Profile
Singapore’s Changi General Hospital (CGH) provides rehabilitation services for patients recovering from injury or immobilized by disease. Its 50 therapists serve hundreds of patients each day.
Business Situation
Therapists at CGH had been using a time-consuming manual method of finding patient data and ordering rehabilitation equipment for patients. The system was inconvenient and error prone.
Solution
CGH implemented a complete, integrated, Microsoft® .NET–connected solution with wireless components to automate operations and give therapists more time for patient interaction.
Benefits
Automated operations
Improved employee mobility
Increased efficiency
Saved staff time
Increased business / “Our operational efficiency is much better with this solution. Our staff can do their jobs faster and better, and the department as a whole is more productive.”
Tan Hai Yang, Principal Physiotherapist, ChangiGeneralHospital
Changi GeneralHospital serves the healthcare needs of the 750,000 residents of east Singapore. The hospital’s Rehabilitative Services department provides a range of rehabilitation services to inpatients and outpatients. Because the department’s therapists are constantly moving from patient to patient, they need instantaneous access to up-to-date patient data such as treatments and medications. To improve efficiency and productivity, CGH implemented a Microsoft® .NET–connected inventory management and data-reporting solution. As a result, therapists now have reliable, real-time access to records. They are also able to spend more time with patients and less time looking for data.
Situation
The Rehabilitative Services department at Changi General Hospital (CGH), located in east Singapore, consists of 50 physical, occupational, and speech therapists, who provide multiple rehabilitation services to inpatients and outpatients. These therapists, assistants, and supervisors travel continuously between wards and require up-to-date patient data and rehabilitation equipment information in order to attend to the hundreds of patients needing treatment on a typical day.
Therapists had long relied on a manual method of accessing patient data. Each time they needed to find information about a patient’s treatment and medications, they had to sit down at a desk and search the hospital’s data system. “It was hard to keep track of how many patients were being treated. The manual methods of accessing and entering all the patient data made it especially hard to simultaneously treat a patient in the ward and a patient just arriving at the hospital,” says Tan Hai Yang, Principal Physiotherapist at CGH.
Therapists at CGH also used a paper-intensive process of entering data for billing patient services and ordering equipment such as crutches, walking aids, and other appliances from the hospital’s central store. “Ordering these items was very time-consuming and involved lots of forms,” says Hai Yang. “Therapists had to fax requests to the store. The therapy assistant then had to prepare the request and send the items to the patients. Once the item was delivered, the therapy assistant had to informthe therapist that the item had been delivered. The therapist then had to physically go to the patient, confirm the item’s delivery, and then put up a form for the therapy assistant to bill the patient for the item. It was not an efficient way of doing things.”
The hospital’s IT department wanted to implement a solution that would offer therapists better, faster methods of accessing patient data. It also wanted to make it easier for busy healthcare specialists to manage equipment inventory.
Solution
After meeting with several vendors, Changi GeneralHospital turned to Hexaware Technologies, an IT consulting firm with a strong presence in the Asia-Pacific region, to help it implement a patient data solution based on Microsoft® .NET connection software. After looking at various systems, Hexaware and CGH determined that a solution built on the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 offered the best technology and ease of integration. The .NET Framework is an integral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
In January 2004, the hospital deployed the new system, which is called Rehabilitative Services Management System (RSMS). The systemoffers data and medical inventory management through a Web-based, smart client application that was built using Windows Forms in the .NET Framework. Patient data and other information is now stored in a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, both part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.
RSMS collects inpatient and outpatient data from an external enterprise resource planning system at the hospital. A Windows Forms–based interface component connects to a Cloverleaf server using Windows Server 2003 Message Queuing technology, picks up this data, and sends it back to the external system. From that system, therapist assistants can access and manage appliance inventory data using a Web application.
Therapists at CGH also access this patient data from Dell Axim X5 Pocket PCs running Microsoft Windows Mobile®2003 software. Using the Pocket PCs, they can enter services provided and appliances sold, as well as billing details. In addition, managers in the Rehabilitative Services department can analyze therapist productivity and sales details from Web-based reports generated by the solution’s reporting module, which is based on Crystal Reports for .NET. In all, 130 therapists, therapist assistants, and therapist supervisors can now view patient and inventory data in real time. Authentication takes place through a Web service that allows single sign-on.
“This solution helps therapists concentrate on patient care while the system handles all the data,” says Kummar Vaalsalam, Senior Project Manager, Hexaware Technologies. “It provides real-time application integration, from the external system to RSMS to the Pocket PCs and back, which means that it delivers up-to-date data. And because the solution supports Wi-Fi connectivity, therapists can have all the information they need on their Pocket PC when they see a patient. And the single sign-on service allows users to access any intranet application at CGH. It really makes things simple.”
The solution’s Message Queuing component can receive 3,000 patient records in less than two seconds, according to Valsalam, as well as provide real-time billing data to external applications. “Because this component uses XML-based templates, it’s more flexible and allows more and faster changes,” he says. “That allowed us to get real-time information, in this case the patient admission data, from the external system through Cloverleaf to the SQL Server database, then to the Web users from the RSMS database.”
That means that therapists located anywhere in the hospital can find out the most current information on a patient before actually visiting him or her. For a therapist at CGH, a quick glance at a Windows Mobile–based Pocket PC reveals a patient’s ID number (which was entered into the database upon admission), as well as what drugs the patient needs and what treatment isrequired.
Benefits
Since deploying the .NET-connected solution, the Rehabilitative Services department at Changi GeneralHospital has automated operations that used to be labor intensive and time-consuming. RSMS has also enhanced the mobility of therapists and greatly increased operational efficiency throughout the department. Because the system enables therapists to concentrate on patient care instead of data management, it has saved time and increased efficiency.
Automated Operations
RSMS has automated the generation of reports on inventory tracking and stocking, which has helped optimize operations and increase efficiency. “This solution has taken away the reliance on paperwork because the requests are linked to the computer,” says Hai Yang. “Also, the therapists who make the inventory requests can now freely go about doing their job, and when they need to make a request, they just find an available computer anywhere in the hospital and type in the request for the items.”
Improved Employee Mobility
Because they can use their Windows Mobile–based Pocket PCs with the RSMS solution, therapists are now able to be much more mobile and more closely involved with rehabilitation patients at CGH. “Previously, therapists had to sit in an office to access data,” says Valsalam. “But the nature of the job is that they have to travel across multiple wards in different buildings. Having the Pocket PC with patient data allows them to both move around and provide good care.”
Increased Efficiency
The wireless Pocket PCs, according to Valsalam, play a major role in the increased efficiency of the Rehabilitative Services staff. “Because therapists can just carry the devices around in their pockets while they’re seeing patients, they are no longer tied to computers,” he says. “The therapists are much more effective now. Productivity, management reporting, and operational efficiency have all gone up tremendously at CGH since we introduced this integrated system.”
“Our operational efficiency is much better with this solution,” adds Hai Yang. “Our staff can do their jobs faster and better, and the department as a whole is more productive.”
In addition, the hospital can now better monitor productivity. “The RSMS solution allows me to track each therapist’s productivity,” says Hai Yang. “I can see how many patients a therapist is treating and how much time is spent with each patient. It also allows the therapists themselves to account for their time, account for productivity, and make sure that patients are getting the best care.”
Time Savings
Another major advantage of RSMS is the amount of time that therapists and their assistants in the Rehabilitative Services department now save. “With the old system, we had five to six therapy assistants working for three to four hours a day in order to complete the billing and auditing for all therapy charges related to patients,” says Hai Yang. “Now, two to three therapy assistants only need one to two hours to audit the billing by the therapists.”
Hai Yang also mentions that the department has been able to increase the number of rehabilitation classes that it holds for patients. Prior to the deployment of RSMS, CGH conducted one class each day. Since the deployment, that number has gone up to three per day, according to Hai Yang. “The increase in classes is because the therapists have more time to lead them now,” he says.
IT staff also have more time to do their jobs, because training on RSMS has gone smoothly since the deployment. Initial training on the system was completed in several months, and the training of all new users is done by a core group of senior therapists.
Increased Productivity, More Patients
The Hexaware solution has also given therapists the ability to maximize the time spent with each patient. “Once a piece of equipment has been issued to a patient, the therapist teaches the patient how to use it. Once that is done, the therapist can instantly acknowledge through the system that the appliance has been issued and used,” says Hai Yang. “This gives the therapy assistant more time to spend assisting therapists and their patients. It also gives therapists more time in general to see patients and not sit at the computer.” The result, he says, is an increase in productivity in the department since the deployment of RSMS.
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NETand Web services, please visit these Web sites:
msdn.microsoft.com/webservices