Employees and patients at Aldey Children's Hospital, Britain's largest children's hospital with a history of 100 years, will bid farewell to the old hospital and crowded ward where they are now. They will move into a spacious hospital and medical research center at a cost of 280 million in 2014.
The application of IT technology will make Alder E glow with new brilliance. As the CIO of Aldey Hospital, Chaudry has to ensure that hospital staff can use the technology they need and that the use of new functions does not cause confusion in the normal operation of the hospital. He even hesitate to postpone the application of Lorenzo software.
Make good use of Meditech system
He is also the head of IT at Liverpool gynecology hospital. Liverpool hospital provides medical services for about 200000 children and adolescents. Liverpool gynecology hospital is the largest teaching hospital in Europe.
When it comes to the informationization of Aldey's and Liverpool's gynecological hospitals, it's important to mention the Meditech Health Care Information System. The users of the system cover medical and administrative personnel, and play a very important role in the daily work of medical and nursing staff. The system can provide patient's medical records and appointment information in real time. In a gynecological hospital, the doctor puts the laptop on the cart and pushes it to the patient's bedside to prescribe the patient.
Zafar said the Meditech system is now a working tool for hospital staff, and he will postpone his plan to replace the Meditech system with a Patient Management System (PAS) until early 2013. As one of the UK's NPfIT (National IT Development Program), the UK Department of Health invested 12.7 billion to build the PAS to transform the UK National Health Insurance Health Information System (NHS IT).
According to the design, PAS will have powerful hospital management functions ranging from recording patient records and appointments, ordering medicines, laboratory tests, and recording patient scans.
According to NpfIT, hospitals in England will install a new PAS -- Lorenzo software. However, after 8 years of NPfIT launch, Lorenzo software can only support 7 health trust funds.
Zafar said the hospital would migrate to Lorenzo only if Lorenzo's software functionality met the needs of the hospital. However, he doubted whether the application of Lorenzo software could match the Meditech system.
"Now we can do almost anything with the Meditech system, from typing predetermined information into online documents to writing electronic prescriptions by the bedside." He said, "we haven't seen the same function in the installed Lorenzo software. Lorenzo software now has functionality, and Meditech has provided a new version. The Meditech system is always one step ahead. "
Three technologies boost paperless
He took a more active attitude towards the other two projects funded by NPfIT.
The Selection and Reservation System is an electronic registration system that allows patients to make appointments at any time through the Internet, telephone or general practice.
Most of the reservations at the two hospitals are made through the system and have met the government's requirement that most patients be admitted within 18 weeks of their appointment. It is understood that most patients choose appointments and booking system to make appointment registration.
The Pacs system provides a central database for storing and applying electronic versions of X-ray, CT, and other hospital scans.
Zafar said that the Pacs system accelerated the transmission of scanning results. In the past, no matter whether the examination was routine examination, it would take several days to get the result. Now, if a routine examination is performed, the patient can get the image results in less than a day. If the situation is urgent, the patient will be able to see the result at any time.
Pacs has brought significant benefits to gynecological hospitals that sometimes rely on radiologists from nearby Liverpool University Hospital to analyze X-rays. In the past, they had to transmit X - ray images to the radiological experts through security express.
These applications are based on the high bandwidth N3 network under NPfIT. The network can give priority to the transmission of application data such as Pacs, followed by standard Internet data.
The digitization embodied by the Pacs system is very much in line with the ardent goal of achieving a completely paperless working environment at the new Aldey Hospital in 2014.
Nurses in the two hospitals have been electronic in filing and taking notes, but doctors are still taking notes of their work.
To help doctors get rid of paper, Zafar is seeking help from Nuznce's digital dictation software that converts voice into text. Doctors in three departments of a gynecological hospital will try out the software, which will be automatically translated into text and stored in the hospital's related systems by phone or hand-held PDA oral reports.
The software will identify useful information from oral reports and organize it into a standardized information format. Zafar said: "this helps to improve the safety of patients. Our biggest problem in the past was the discharge summary for patients. In the past, due to the different ways of transcription and output, discharge summary has three different ways of showing. After applying this system, no matter how you describe it, the system will eventually form a standardized discharge summary.
Two technologies to improve efficiency
Now Zafar has begun using Kaseya's IT automation platform to numbering and upgrading 2,000 computers crowded into the Aldey Tower. The platform can analyze each computer connected to the hospital network and list the hardware they use and the software they run.
"This is a very old hospital with a history of about 100 years. There are many small rooms. It's hard to find everything. " "We don't know what the specifications are, what operating system they're using, and which computer has antivirus software," Zafar said.
In contrast, once the hospital has installed an automated operating platform, IT departments can monitor which machines are connected to the network and where they are, thereby managing them in a control center.
The system will be installed and run within 5 weeks. Once the monitoring program is installed, the system will upgrade Aldey's computer through the network, install new software, upgrade and patch the operating system, and update or repair the damaged operating system installation.
In gynecology hospital, the system has been used for nearly two years.
Another system used to improve work efficiency is the face recognition system, Zafar said. In Britain, this technology is first used in hospitals. At present, the system is planned to be launched at the emergency room of Alder E hospital. Applying the new face recognition system, a doctor can log in to the machine or application simply by approaching the computer he wants to use.
The function of the face recognition system is realized by software analysis of the doctor's face pictures taken by the camera fixed on the computer. Zafar believes that this application increases the security of the system, and users do not need to enter a user name and password when using different applications, because the system can single sign on to all applications.
"People want them to quit logging on when they leave the computer. This system can be tested in such a fast-paced environment. "In an emergency room, doctors and nurses keep track of a patient's status through a four-hour window, and they don't want to keep entering a username and password to log on to the Meditech system to update the tracking information," Zafar said. I told them that you could do this with your face. "
Someone might think Zafar, as a CIO, might be drowning in a large number of high-tech projects. In fact, Zafar believes that this is not the most difficult part of the work.
"In my daily work, I face the challenge of getting employees to work harder and give effective advice." He said, "our IT Management Committee is made up of clinicians, not IT staff. We let them decide what they want to do. "
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