InterSystems announced that Mater Private Hospital has implemented InterSystems Ensemble® in its key hospital departments to help reduce its IT costs. Its plan is to use integration to assist with the consolidation of patient records, thereby streamlining work processes, reducing duplication, improving data quality and delivering more cost-effective and improved patient care.
The Mater Private, Ireland's leading private hospital, has been bringing world-class medical facilities and world leading health professionals to Ireland for many years. The Hospital has pioneered major developments in Irish medicine, introduced outstanding technological innovation and services, and is Ireland's only private hospital that provides an integrated 24-hour, 365-day intensive care and anaesthetic service.
Ensemble provides the hospital with a seamless platform for integration and the development of connectable applications. The Mater specifically chose Ensemble because of its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to support HL7 messaging standards plus a wide variety of other integration interface types.
The software integration architecture upgrade, undertaken by the hospital's in-house IT team with support and guidance from the InterSystems team, will enable the hospital's Patient Administration System (PAS) to consolidate information with three bespoke interfaces. The first is a Web service for linking consultant systems to the PAS for up-to-date patient demographics and test results. The second is to its laboratory database to facilitate order messages to outside labs. The third is for its Blood Product Charging system to generate HL7 Detailed Financial Transaction billing messages.
David Delaney, Lab and IT Business Analyst at Mater Hospital, said, "Rolling out Ensemble has taken us closer to the ‘holy grail’ for healthcare IT: comprehensive electronic patient records. Our problems were familiar to many hospitals - every department had its own systems. Using Ensemble as our integration platform provides us with the in-house means - the application, appliance, device connectivity, and interoperability - for bringing everything together by integrating our systems with relative ease."
Delaney explains that "We are also a private hospital, and like any business we need to demonstrate that time and money can be saved with any IT investment. We anticipate that this approach of connecting our departments via Ensemble will cut down work, which would normally take five days for third-party developers to complete, down to two days - an estimated 60% drop in cost reduction."(1)
The hospital is currently testing a bespoke interface that will link the PAS with its customer relationship management programme to match referral information against future marketing activities. It is also reviewing how Ensemble Web browser-based dashboards displaying real-time data could help with the day-to-day management of the hospital, showing information such as the number of daily admissions and discharges with trends, and results sent to general practitioners.
Jonathan Selby, UK and Ireland Country Manager, InterSystems said, "The Mater Private Hospital is one of several leading hospitals in Ireland that are realising the clear advantages of modernising their in-house IT integration services with InterSystems Ensemble. Fundamentally, patient care is being dramatically improved from departments being able to improve their processes, their efficacy, and quality of their healthcare services, thereby enabling healthcare professionals to concentrate on what they do best."
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About InterSystems
InterSystems Corporation is a worldwide leader in breakthrough solutions for connected care with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and offices in 23 countries. InterSystems Ensemble® is a seamless platform for integration and the development of connectable applications. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a strategic platform for healthcare informatics, and the creation of an Electronic Health Record on a regional or national scale. InterSystems TrakCare™ is a Web-based unified healthcare information system that rapidly provides the benefits of an Electronic Patient Record (TrakCare is not available in the United States). InterSystems DeepSee™ is software that makes it possible to embed real-time analytics capabilities in transactional applications. InterSystems Caché® is the most widely-used database in clinical applications.