Management Information System

HealthWyse is in the business of providing information services to mobile home care, hospice and private duty nurses. HealthWyse provides a way to automate the processes that they use to care for the patients as well as automate the backend processes within the agency to allow seamless transfer of that information, management of that information and also the billing of that information.

http://www.sybase.com
[Video Transcript]
Healthwyse is in the business of providing information services to mobile home care, hospice and private duty nurses. So, our primary focus is to provide a way to automate the processes that they use to care for patients, as well as automate the backend processes within the agency to allow seamless transfer of that information, management of that information and then the ultimate billing of that information. So, we try to provide a closed-loop system that takes care of all aspects of the information needs.
Well, the Sybase product is core to our operation. We use the Sybase iAnywhere database on each of the mobile devices that we use so that those clinicians that are using those devices in the patients home are actually operating off of a Sybase database. That database then replicates back to our main database in our data center and exchanges not only the information thats recorded during the day by the clinician, but also any information recorded by another clinician or another user in the agency; and then, once that information is in the main database in our data center, that is replicated back out to a Sybase database that is located within the agency.
The other thing I would like to add to that is what SQL Anywhere provided for us was a platform that could work not only in a mobile environment, but also be able to support a fairly, very large database that could be queried and be used in applications that we needed to provide in the agency. It had the mobility, as well as the replication technology, that we needed in order to make a system like this work.
Within healthcare, it costs about $2,000 a day for a patient in a hospital, compared to a patient in a home, its about $100 a day. So, over the last decade or so, there has been a tremendous push to have patients, more care taken in the patients home. Now, this places a tremendous burden on home care providers because theyve got sicker patients and they have to provide more services to them. In the old world, where you had everything on paper, then it really put a challenge to them, not only on the time it took to document that increased acuity level that they had with patients, but also placed a burden on the management of those agencies to really improve processes, make sure quality of care was high, they had this paper jungle that they were trying to deal with in order to try to make those things happen. So, what we saw was an opportunity to use information systems to be able to not only make the clinicians job easier and the documentation that they have in really supporting their decision-making, but also, in the management of the agencies to get access to information in real time so that they can make the decisions they need to make to not only improve quality of care for patients, but also to improve the efficiency of the agencies.
The real challenge we had was that we needed to provide a system that allowed that information to go in at the point of care. You cannot document the information twice, it has to be done once. Its too expensive to do it twice. And, so, therefore, in order to take advantage of the kinds of decision support and other things that you can do with the information, it had to be at the point of care to do that; and, of course, the challenge there was to provide an environment, an ergonomically fit with the environment, that the clinician is working in, as well as one that was easy for them to use because these clinicians are not technology people, they are people who are trained and whose sole focus is delivering patient care. So, we did things like put it in an environment which is easy for the clinician to use. We dont need a, theyre using a PDA, they dont need a flat surface to put it on, which, in a lot of cases, there is not one that they can use, we use terms, we dont use computer terms in the application,

Duration : 0:9:4

[youtube CEbDzkPxCa8]