Healthcare Organizations Tap Siemens Healthcare Enterprise Services To Fast-Track Health IT Purchases

Siemens helps healthcare providers better predict operational and IT expenses and control ongoing costs while deploying enterprise-wide health IT solutions.

Recently, Siemens Healthcare announced several recent Soarian health information technology (IT) sales that were bolstered by Siemens ability to deliver a range of cloud computing and managed services. More healthcare organizations today are moving to electronic health records (EHRs) that provide a platform for an enterprise-wide approach to health IT. In today’s reimbursement environment, it is increasingly important for those organizations to challenge traditional notions of enterprise IT as a cost center, and Siemens is uniquely positioned to help customers create a more sustainable approach to health IT implementations with a range of options from operations to system management to infrastructure and application support. Helping customers deploy health IT solutions amidst a turbulent financial climate is a mandate of Agenda 2013, a two-year global initiative of Siemens Healthcare to increase its competitiveness and innovative capacity.

“The concept of sustainability has never been more important to healthcare organizations than in today’s environment, where many of our customers do business in highly competitive markets and contend with an oftentimes challenging payor mix,” said David Hamilton, senior vice president, Enterprise Services, Siemens Healthcare. “Our aim is to assist customers in finding ways to more predictably budget for health IT, while helping them ensure that key operational goals are met in a timely manner.”

Katherine Shaw Bethea (KSB) Hospital, Dixon, Ill., is an 80-bed community hospital that signed a 10-year agreement to implement a full suite of Soarian Clinicals including Soarian Critical Care and Soarian Emergency Department (ED), along with Siemens medication management solutions, Soarian Device Connect, Soarian Electronic Document Management (EDM), Decision Support Solutions, Soarian Quality Measures and ePrescribing.

KSB Hospital initially was operating in a best-of-breed IT environment and had chosen Siemens to provide only the solutions that filled the functional gaps to address the requirements to attest to Meaningful Use of a certified electronic health record. However, the affordable cloud computing option available for the Soarian solution helped minimize capital expenditure and Siemens presented a roadmap to help KSB Hospital administration begin planning an enterprise-wide clinical health IT implementation. Additionally, Siemens was able to help KSB Hospital staff expedite the implementation timeline. KSB Hospital was looking for strong clinical functionality, significant Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) adoption, affordable price and ability to adapt the system as their needs change.

“As we evaluated solutions, we began to realize that Siemens had a road map and a commitment to helping move us beyond thinking about best-of-breed solutions and to start thinking about an enterprise clinical IT solution that could be extended all the way out to our ambulatory practice community,” said Tim Broos, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital.  “In particular, Soarian’s workflow engine hard-wires efficiency across the organization to support quality of care improvement and cost reduction.”

At 342 licensed beds Woman’s Christian Association (WCA) Hospital, Jamestown, N.Y., recently signed a four-year term extension that also included the addition of the Soarian enterprise health IT suite including Soarian Clinicals and Soarian Financials, as well as EDM, and Siemens medication management solutions. Located in a small, New York town, WCA Hospital also contends with a challenging payor mix. Soarian across the WCA Hospital enterprise will provide a more seamless flow of data, while decreasing the need to use bolt-on third-party applications.

“It was readily apparent that we could realize significant efficiency gains from expanding the breadth of our Siemens health IT portfolio across clinical departments,” said Keith Robison, CIO, WCA Hospital. “Soarian will allow us to collect data in new ways and present a more complete view of the patient to our clinicians so information entered about a patient in the ED will be seamlessly presented to all acute care providers.”

At St. Tammany Parish Hospital, Covington, La., a 222-bed acute care hospital, administration recently signed a contract extension with Siemens that included an implementation of Soarian Financials. The Soarian Financials implementation will include modules such as Patient Access, Analytics, Revenue Management, Contract Modeling, Scheduling and basic EDM. All of these applications will be hosted by Siemens Healthcare. The purchase will allow St. Tammany to deploy a next-generation revenue cycle solution that can help the organization prepare for major industry changes such as shared savings, value-based purchasing and ICD-10.  Additionally the financial solution from Siemens can help the hospital reduce the reliance on bolt-on third party applications.

For more information about Soarian, please visit: http://usa.siemens.com/soarian.

Launched by Siemens Healthcare Sector in November 2011, Agenda 2013 is a two-year global initiative to further strengthen the Healthcare Sector's innovative power and competitiveness. Specific measures will be implemented in four fields of action: Innovation, Competitiveness, Regional Footprint, and People Development.

About Siemens Healthcare Sector
The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. Siemens Healthcare employs some 51,000 employees worldwide and operates around the world. In fiscal year 2011 (to September 30), the Sector posted revenue of 12.5 billion euros and profit of around 1.3 billion euros. For more information, visit: www.siemens.com/healthcare.