Entries tagged with patient safety - Channel 10

Microsoft Healthcare Common User Interface: Now available free worldwide

bcrounse — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:48:00 GMT

Anyone who works in healthcare knows that many of today’s clinical software applications leave a lot to be desired when it comes to “user experience”. Unlike ubiquitous, commodity software used in other businesses, healthcare applications are highly proprietary and often based on legacy technologies. Clinicians find that much of what’s available today is often too hard to use. Becoming proficient on these clinical applications requires lots of training and that can mean taking already scarce healthcare workers off-line for days or weeks at a time. Worse yet, even if clinicians become proficient on one vendor’s solution, they are likely to encounter something entirely different in every hospital where they work, requiring even more training. But what if there was a common, more standardized user interface for clinical applications? What if the user experience was pretty much the same no matter where a clinician worked? Would doctors, nurses and other clinical workers be better served?

Last July on this Blog I told you about an ambitious project to develop a standardized user interface to administrative and clinical systems. The project was launched more than a year ago by Microsoft and the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. It is part of a country-wide upgrade of the data spine, clinical and administrative applications used by the NHS.

Based on that work, Microsoft has launched The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) web site. It provides Design Guidance and controls that allow a new generation of safer, more usable and compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created. In this special video edition of my House Calls for Healthcare Professionals series, we take a look at the the work that's been going on at the NHS and how that work, through the MSCUI, now offers promise to improve worker satisfaction and patient safety around the world. Enjoy the show!

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

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Program Guests

Dr. Mike Bainbridge is a former general medical practitioner who now leads the Clinical Architecture team at NHS Connecting for
Health, a group that delivers innovations in hardware design, clinical interface design and interfaces to the electronic medical record for both healthcare professionals and citizens.

Stephen Corbett is Head of UI Design for NHS Connecting for Health where he evangelizes the user-centred design approach to building software. Since graduating in Ergonomics in 1988, he has been working in the field of software usability in various industries.

Andrew Kirby is a Director at Microsoft UK where he is responsible for the delivery of solutions and services to the National Health Service which includes the delivery of the Common User Interface Programme.

Microsoft Azyxxi One Year Later; 21 hospitals and counting

bcrounse — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:00:00 GMT

A little more than a year ago, I introduced Channel 10 readers to Azyxxi, Microsoft's unified health enterprise platform solution. I also recorded an audio-cast with executives from our Health Solutions Group. A few months ago, I updated you with another audio-cast featuring one of Azyxxi's early adopter customers, New York Presbyterian Hospital. Today, Microsoft is announcing the addition of yet another well known hospital system to the growing list of Azyxxi customers; Novant Health.

Novant will implement Azyxxi throughout the enterprise, initially focusing on intensive care units and emergency departments and then expanding throughout its eight acute care hospitals and an 800-physician medical group. With Novant and NY Presbyterian, early Azyxxi adopters now include 21 different hospitals at academic medical centers such as Johns Hopkins Health System; large health systems such as MedStar Health; and the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange, which will eventually tie together 25 different hospitals in Southeastern Wisconsin.

As we discussed in my most recent audio-cast, New York Presbyterian Hospital and its associated network is using Azyxxi to unify its existing and legacy information systems to create broad accessibility of its vast quantities of information. New York Presbyterian's senior vice president and CIO, Aurelia Boyer says, “As we’ve automated more and more of the processes within the hospital and created more electronic data sources, our ability to mine and utilize that data is becoming more of a priority. Making the data from different systems available in a way that makes good management, clinical and quality sense takes a lot of effort, and is a major goal for an institution like ours. Giving people in the hospital ready access to different kinds of data is priceless to us.”

Whereas New York Presbyterian is looking at Azyxxi as an administrative tool to guide organizational decisions, Novant Health is working to implement Azyxxi in support of its clinical operations. “I’ve seen estimates that say a physician spends most of his or her time collecting information about the patient before they deliver the care,” says Rich McKnight, Novant’s CIO. “Our goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of time in information gathering, and increase the amount of time in taking care of the patient.”

It has been my personal pleasure to attend many Azyxxi customer briefings with executives from our Health Solutions Group. I can tell you that the solution is generating lots of excitement in the industry. I also remember very well sitting with a senior finance executive at MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., as he was extolling the virtues of Azyxxi for revenue cycle enhancement and recovery. The system gave Washington Hospital visibility to millions of dollars in high-value procedures and tests that were being improperly coded and therefore not collected by the hospital; millions of dollars that can now be spent delivering care to patients.

As Azyxxi liberates healthcare data from the constraints of silos and systems that don't "talk" to one another, I can only imagine the implications for providing cost and quality transparency in the industry, and our potential to improve the efficacy and efficiency of the care being provided by clinicians.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Saving money, saving lives: Vanderbilt's perioperative information management system

bcrounse — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 21:31:00 GMT

Does information technology really improve care quality and safety? Can well designed and implemented clinical software applications really improve physician satisfaction? Can healthcare information technology really have a positive return on investment? For Vanderbilt University Medical Center's perioperative anesthesia department the answers are yes, yes, and yes!

While not every IT solution in healthcare clearly demonstrates results as stunning as those I'm about to share, here's what I gleaned from a keynote presentation made by Dr. Paul St. Jacques earlier this week at the MSHUG Tech Forum 2007 in Redmond. Dr. St. Jacques shared the stage with me on day one of the conference. I delivered the opening keynote, and he provided the close.

Dr. St. Jacques is Associate Professor and Director of Anesthesiology Informatics in the anesthesiology department at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt's perioperative information management system, VPIMS, serves as "master control" for the medical center's 60 operating rooms in 6 suites, handling thousands of surgical cases each year. You may be surprised to learn that less than 5 percent of all surgeries in America are fully managed and documented electronically. That's right. In the year 2007, 95 percent of the "life and death" work-flow processes in surgery are still done on paper.

So what's to be gained by going electronic? How about a 100 percent improvement in on-time cases starts, or a 90 percent compliance with perioperative antibiotic protocols resulting in an 1 percent decrease in surgical wound infections. How about a 67 percent reduction in chart errors. How about the average time to produce a billable chart moving from 12 days to 1, with a $1 Million plus improvement in formerly lost revenues. Or how about a 10 percent yearly increase in case volume without adding capacity, keeping in mind that every additional case per day generates more than $1 Million in revenue per year.

VPIMS handles everything from surgery scheduling, to perioperative documentation, to billing. In addition, a module called Vigilance provides real-time monitoring of every operating room in the facility with multi-view streaming video, patient vital signs, alerts and reminders. It might look like something out of Star Wars, but what it does for patient safety and staff satisfaction is priceless. And did I mention there's a whole lot of Microsoft technology under the covers?

Greater detail on VPIMS is beyond the scope of my Blog. Let me just say if you ever want proof that information technology in medicine saves lives and saves money, look no farther than the very fine work going on at Vanderbilt. And yes, VPIMS has been so successful at Vanderbilt that the medical center is exploring options to commercialize and sell it. And with 95 percent of the market still doing perioperative management on paper, they should have no problem finding customers.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

PS If you would like information about some of the other presentations at this year's MSHUG Tech Forum, my good friend and colleauge who serves as Microsoft's senior technical strategist for our worldwide health group, Roberto Ruggeri, provides play by play coverage on his Healthcare IT Blog.

Diagnostic software: Improving patient safety around the world

bcrounse — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:23:00 GMT

I'd like to draw your attention to a new video that we've just released as part of my House Calls for Healthcare Professionals series. The program takes a look at diagnostic software developed by Robertson Technologies.

I met Dr. Joel Robertson about five years ago. I and others from Microsoft (most notably Dr. David Heckerman at Microsoft Research) have been advising Dr. Robertson during the development of his company's software. The result of this work, NxOpinion, is one of the most significant, accurate, responsive and intuitive diagnostic programs I’ve seen.

I believe there are many applications for its use in emerging markets where physicians in rural villages or lesser-trained individuals working in public health need diagnostic support. I believe there is also a role for diagnostic software in developed nations to improve patient safety and the quality of care in settings such as nurse call centers, community clinics, retail clinics, and urgent care settings. There is also the potential for this technology to be used by consumers in evaluating personal health issues at home.

Enjoy the show!

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

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