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.
Challenge
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 (GAMS), 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 ‘guideline management tool’ (GM Tool) and a ‘workflow management system’. The GM 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 GAMS 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: Personalised 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
- GM 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 patient information management application, GAMS, 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