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Microsoft, Penn State Hershey Medical Center Showcase Road Map to Patient Flow Efficiencies at First Healthcare Provider Symposium
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Institutions nationwide share IT approaches and advances to address major healthcare challenges including performance management, patient flow and chronic condition treatment.
REDMOND, Wash., Dec. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In the midst of a season
of renewed focus on solving big healthcare challenges in the United States,
healthcare providers from across the country are convening this week at
Microsoft Corp.'s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash., for the first U.S.
Public Sector Healthcare Provider Symposium. Symposium attendees are examining
ways to apply information technology (IT) innovations to solve real-world
problems in their clinical, business and research settings. From the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs to Penn State's Milton S. Hershey Medical
Center and many others, healthcare IT leaders will examine the latest business
system improvements including performance management, unified intelligence,
chronic condition management, personal health platforms and patient flow
management, all made possible by leveraging commercial off-the-shelf
technologies.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)
"One critical role of technology in the healthcare industry is to better
enable and empower the nurses, doctors and staff who are providing caring
environments for patients," said Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft U.S.
Public Sector. "This symposium showcases the innovation taking place within
clinical, research and business healthcare settings -- innovations that will
evolve the industry into one that is more collaborative, data-driven and
results-oriented without breaking the bank."
Microsoft Patient Flow Management Solutions
Enhanced workplace performance and usable data is needed most acutely in
the area of hospital patient workflows, which have strategic and financial
consequences. Variation in patient flow occurs throughout a hospital and
contributes to such problems as extended wait times, overcrowding and boarding
in the emergency department or post-anesthesia care units, bumped and late
surgeries in the operating room, lack of available inpatient and intensive
care unit beds, overburdened staff and physicians, and delays in providing
care to patients.
As many providers know, emergency departments, intensive care units and
hospital hallways become inappropriate and expensive holding areas when
patients are not transferred to an inpatient unit in a timely manner. When
delays or overcrowdings occur, incoming patients experience delays in
receiving care or leave without being treated. Evidence of poorly managed
patient flow often surfaces first in the emergency department, critical care
units and surgical areas, but can be found throughout the hospital.
One example of where Microsoft and its partner ecosystem are already
helping to solving such problems is at the Department of Emergency Medicine at
Penn State Hershey Medical Center. Penn State Hershey Medical Center employs
more than 350 people and every year has nearly 50,000 emergency room visits --
on average, about 135 patients per day. With help from Microsoft and certified
partner Orlando Software Group Inc., the medical center successfully used
ProcessView, an add-in to Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007, to analyze
and improve process workflow for patients with chest pains, examining each
decision point in a patient's diagnosis and treatment plan and assigning
probabilities to those points. The program's algorithms then identified every
unique workflow path and determined the probability of occurrence for each,
resulting in improved resource allocation, a more efficient workflow, and an
improved standard of patient care.
"Without an analytics tool, people who understand process flow can make
educated guesses about where the bottlenecks are and what changes to make in
the system, but guesses are not true analytics," said Dr. Christopher
DeFlitch, vice chair for the Department of Emergency Medicine, and chief
medical information officer at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. "Even
slight changes can cost hospitals millions of dollars and potentially make
patients vulnerable."
"In about three hours, we were able to create a top-level process flow
diagram for the overall process," said Frank Kapper, vice president and
principal partner of Orlando Software Group. "With this information the
department could focus on the highest occurrence of workflows and make sure it
had the proper staffing, equipment and supplies."
Hershey is now taking the analytical process a step farther with future
plans to establish a business process management framework to streamline and
monitor performance, in addition to employing predictive analysis to
anticipate and solve potential patient flow problems before they occur. Using
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 HL7 adapters to incorporate real-time
quantitative data into the OSGi ProcessView analytics engine and using
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to produce an Organizational
Excellence Portal, Hershey's ability to manage and monitor patient flow
outcomes will be further enhanced, helping to maximize hospital resources and
improve patient care.
More information on Microsoft's patient flow work with Hershey Medical
Center can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/partnersolutionmarketplace/Case
StudyDetail.aspx?casestudyid=4000002068.
Additional information on Microsoft Health Solutions can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/health.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their
full potential.
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.
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