Patient Information Management System Built on Guideline Management Tools

How our integrated patient information management application aided a top healthcare provider in enhancing their healthcare operations?

Overview

Comprehensive patient information management system to streamline and automate patient management and administrative tasks. The client also seeks an Antimicrobial Stewardship that filters antibiotic prescriptions and identifies high-risk usage.

Developed GAMS, a .Net web app that includes AMS-aligned medication tracking, physician details, and ward assignments.
Import guidelines from the centralized Guideline Management Tool and Workflow Management Tool.
GM Tool to create workflows to guide end-users (doctors and nurses) to best medicine recommendations.

Case

For almost as long as organizations have been around, they have created and maintained workflows, and they have always relied on manual ways of managing those workflows. However, this tedious activity of manual workflow management comes with a number of bottlenecks and challenges, forcing organizations to seek out more digital alternatives to manage and automate their activities. It is from this content, automated workflow management systems were developed. To record, manage and monitor specific tasks and to ensure that they are carried out correctly, consistently and efficiently. Our client, one of the most prestigious healthcare institutions in Australia, reached out to our team at TA, to develop a comprehensive patient information management system that would streamline, simplify and automate their patient management processes and administrative operations with perfection.

Challenges

In today's healthcare services, proper patient information management is required for effective administrative processes and operations. Our client, one of the leading healthcare institutions in the world with multiple branches and managing countless patients and caregivers, wanted a patient information management system that could maintain, monitor, streamline and optimize all their patient information, such as details about drugs prescribed, consulting physicians, wards admitted to, etc. In addition to being a strong proponent of Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS), our client desired a patient information management system that could filter the prescription of antibiotics by physicians and simplify suggestions to identify high-risk antibiotic usage. Among several other Web and Cloud providers, the client was impressed by our innovative ideas for this solution and chose our team for the development.

The challenges faced by our client include:

Lack of efficiency in streamlining patient management activities
Reduce the overuse of antibiotics without lowering the quality of care
Non-digital forms of data are easily lost and hard to find
Difficulty in allocating resources and assigning tasks with productivity and ease
Increased costs, time and resource wastage

Solution

Our team developed Guideline and Management System, a web application on .Net that provides a comprehensive patient information management system. This online patient record management system systematically organizes patient information, keeps track of patient visits, medications prescribed-particularly in accordance with AMS standards, details on assigned physicians, wards they are admitted to and so on.

This patient information management application consists of a ‘protocol administration tool’ and a ‘workflow management system’. The protocol administration tool consists of several workflows to guide the end-users (junior doctors and nurses) to the most appropriate medicine recommendation based on the patient's health record and physical findings in the hospital. The workflow management system consists of recommended drugs or combinations of multiple drugs that will be derived based on specific stated requirements for an indication. As per the given details of the patient's condition, there will be preferred recommendations and alternate recommendations. For example, in a workflow for an indication, there could be any number of preferred recommendations and alternate recommendations. The order will be defined by the sequence in which the recommendations are configured in the workflow. Another important part to pay attention to is that, based on the drug restriction indication category, ‘non-restricted’ means it doesn't require approval, ‘restricted’ - needs approval and ‘highly restricted’ - approval and a nomination for an approver (senior physician or doctor) are required.

The major modules in the solution include:

Guideline management: Import guidelines from the centralized Guideline Management Tool and Workflow Management Tool
Approval management: Enables restrictions and approval policy
Workflow management: Personalized summary view of approvals and related actions relevant to users for patients under their care

The solutions incorporated were:

Web application for patient management, ward round management and approval management
Protocol administration tool to create workflows to guide end-users (doctors and nurses) to best medicine recommendation
Guideline managers can create and publish guidelines for users
Multiple guideline managers can work on the same guidelines
Custom parameters are created as per the requirements of the domain
Flag high-risk antibiotic indications

Impact

Our protocol administration tool is essentially a general solution that can be tailored for any type of company in its attempts to enhance, automate, and simplify workflows in order to successfully drive efficiency and execute the following best practices:

Enhance administrative and management processes
Create easy-to-use, employee-friendly workflows
Improve efficiency, consistency and accountability to operations
Eliminate paper-based documentation that can lead to loss of data
Automated workflows save time, effort and money