Siemens Announces New Clinical Solutions To Help Improve Care Coordination At HIMSS
New clinical offerings join next-generation revenue cycle offerings to provide seamless exchange of information within the hospital and beyond, leading to more efficient care delivery
Recently, Siemens Healthcare, Malvern, Pa., has announced a commitment to enhance the Soarian enterprise information system to support ambulatory physician practices and emergency care. These offerings enable organizations to focus on care coordination, quality improvements and cost reductions necessary for health reform initiatives. These solutions will leverage Soarian's embedded workflow technology that facilitates care coordination across the continuum. Built on a modern, third-generation service-oriented architecture, these solutions will enable healthcare organizations to be agile and flexible as they adapt to rapid change. The solutions will be demonstrated in the Siemens Healthcare booth #2423 at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2012 Annual Conference and Exhibition, from Feb. 20 - 24, at the Venetian Sands Expo Center.
Soarian Ambulatory
In an effort to better address the needs of health enterprise customers with a patient-centered care delivery model, Siemens has committed to broaden the capabilities of Soarian Clinicals to include the ambulatory practice/physician office space. This development effort will be a multi-year, multi-release project with the expected general availability of the first release in 2013, as part of Soarian Clinicals 3.4. This approach will leverage and enhance Soarian's existing capabilities, such as embedded workflow capabilities and will include the development of new functionality and content to optimize clinician workflow in the ambulatory environment. These new clinical features combined with the next generation revenue cycle management will create a comprehensive solution. The goal is to deliver a robust enterprise solution that facilitates coordinated patient care in a meaningful way.
"Physicians are tasked with delivering high-quality care in a demanding environment and we believe that they must have complete and comprehensive patient data available that is presented to them in an appropriate context," said John Glaser, PhD, CEO, Health Services Business Unit, Siemens Healthcare. "The ability to deliver an integrated, single-database clinical suite to ambulatory care settings will create efficiencies through improved enterprise documentation and ordering, and also will provide a unified tool set with a consistent user experience across care venues."
With the addition of the Soarian Ambulatory module, the resulting enterprise solution will be an integrated single database clinical suite that leverages Soarian's open architecture and workflow technology. For instance, the solution is expected to include enterprise "worklisting" or task management. Each day, busy physicians must handle hundreds of patient-care-relevant tasks. These tasks vary in urgency but they must all be addressed in order to deliver safe, high-quality care. With consolidated, workflow-enabled enterprise worklisting, physicians can receive time-sensitive notifications and view incoming results, send and receive clinically relevant communication, handle prescription eRenewals and manage documentation – all in one location. Effective, informed task management will become one of the critical success factors necessary for care coordination. The new Soarian Ambulatory function is designed for organizations who are already using Soarian Clinicals and who are seeking to tightly integrated IT solution across the hospital and owned or closely affiliated physician office practices.
Soarian ED
At HIMSS 2012, Siemens is also announcing expanded Soarian Clinicals functionality to further support the emergency department with streamlined provider documentation, enhanced patient tracking and medication management capabilities, which will be features of version 3.3 of Soarian Clinicals. These enhanced functions are collected in Soarian ED, an integrated Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) alternative to stand-alone departmental solutions operating on disparate databases. Soarian ED uses the same patient database, the same embedded workflow technology, and other components of Soarian Clinicals. For example, clinicians in the patient care units can access the ED documentation before the patient arrives. Pre-arrival, triage data, nursing assessment, and physician charting and assessments can be shared across the hospital.
Additionally, the data is captured once and is reused wherever it is needed – not only in the ED. The result is better teamwork and coordination than is possible using a standalone system. The solution provides a single, up-to-date view of patient information across the enterprise giving clinicians in the ED and other departments access to a patient's complete medical history. The functionality is already in use at MedCentral Health System, Mansfield, Ohio.
"Our strategic plan is focused on integrated solutions to support the continuum of care." said Mike Mistretta, vice president and chief information officer, MedCentral Health System. "Soarian ED was the logical solution for MedCentral to support our efforts to provide a fully integrated electronic health record that will connect clinicians to comprehensive patient information across the care continuum while reducing redundancy and improving productivity."
The result is an enterprise-wide view of the patient and wider adoption by clinicians across departments. Soarian ED features a collaborative documentation environment that enables physicians and nurses to dynamically build comprehensive documentation as case progresses. By enabling each member of a patient's care team to contribute to documentation, this feature helps achieve significant improvements in care coordination and documentation turnaround times, enhancing clinician and patient satisfaction.
"Addressing our patient safety and quality initiatives as well as care coordination, patient throughput and overall satisfaction are benefits the clinicians at MedCentral anticipate from the Soarian integrated ED solution," said Pam Crawford, PhD, RN, vice president nursing, MedCentral Health System. "Having a seamless view of patient information readily available across the enterprise is invaluable. Through standardization of the information we will have less redundancy, consistent quality of documentation, and more efficiency in hand-off communication."
Built for the fast paced ED environment, the complaint-driven provider documentation templates provide a flexible, easy point-and-click user interface that enables clinicians to quickly select patient care details, generate complete easy-to-read documentation, and facilitate accurate charge capture to streamline billing. Soarian ED supports automated discharge instructions that are comprehensive in nature and that help streamline the patient disposition process. Analytics help organizations monitor performance, measure progress and identify opportunities for further improvement in the quality and efficiency of care delivery.
The HIMSS Press kit is available at www.usa.siemens.com/PR
Launched recently, Siemens Agenda 2013 program 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.
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.
SOURCE: Siemens Healthcare