News
Avaya ACE integrates intelligent communications into healthcare
applications
12 May 2010
Avaya has announced the Agile Communications Environment (ACE)
for helping hospitals boost safety, efficiency and to enable faster,
more accurate clinical decisions.
ACE is a service-oriented architecture-based application that uses
web services to integrate communications from nearly any vendor with
clinical support applications.
The software runs on IBM’s Health Integration Framework, which
includes WebSphere and DB2, and provides application developers with a
suite of tools including application adapters built on healthcare
standards such as HIPAA EDI, HL7 and IHE integration profiles. As a
result, clients can more easily integrate patient and clinical data
using a single interface.
Healthcare providers like Florida Hospital are seeking solutions to
efficiently manage patient care. A 2200-bed healthcare institution with
seven campuses surrounding Orlando, Florida, Avaya has teamed with IBM
Global Services to jointly deploy Avaya ACE and the IBM Health
Integration Framework to integrate and automate communications for
Emergency Equipment Compliance.
Joint Commission regulatory requirements mandate that emergency
medical equipment, such as defibrillators and airway intubators, must be
tested every 24 hours to ensure it is fully functional at the moment of
an urgent patient crisis. Equipment tests must be validated and
recorded; non-operational equipment or missing supplies reported,
repaired or replaced — a time-consuming, manual process that is open to
error.
The new solution will allow a nurse to run the test check and record
the status in a laptop. Appropriate departments will automatically be
notified when equipment repair or supply replacement is needed. Staff
are subsequently notified via text messages or phone calls if test
requirements have not been met within a 24-hour period. Finally, the
hospital has an auditable record that the tests have been performed.
“Florida Hospital is always looking for ways that we can improve
patient safety and care by giving our caregivers more time with their
patients and reducing time for administrative tasks,” said Jayne Bassler,
chief clinical informatics officer, Florida Hospital. “By integrating
communications with our emergency equipment management system, we expect
to improve positive outcomes while becoming more efficient and meeting
our regulatory requirements.”
Communications-enabling the patient information portal
Avaya has also integrated communications into the CAREfx Fusionfx
Patient Information Aggregation portal using Avaya ACE and the IBM
Health Integration Framework to enable real-time clinical alerts. The
award-winning solution provides visibility into a healthcare provider’s
presence from the CAREfx portal. While in the portal, colleagues and
support personnel can contact one another using click to call, instant
or text messaging, email and/or file sharing.
For example, when admitting a patient with chest pain, the care
provider can quickly identify the best communication method to use to
contact the patient’s primary care physician. Using either a quick text
message or instant message with the primary care physician’s office, the
care provider can request a prior EKG and cardiologist note without
having to pick up the phone.
According to Avaya client research, communications-enabling the
CAREfx portal has demonstrated a 75% improvement in clinical workflow:
reducing time from emergency to recovery to two hours from eight.
Streamlining patient discharge processes
Using Avaya Healthcare Workflow Solutions, hospitals can also make
patient discharge processes more efficient. By building communications
into the patient checkout process, multiple departments can be notified
well ahead of a patient’s discharge time, including pharmacy, dietary,
housekeeping, transport, patient accounts and more.
By providing enough advance notice, deliveries from pharmacy or
dietary can be halted, thus decreasing waste; rooms can be turned more
quickly, and patients can be on their way home or to other facilities
much sooner. With the average US hospital bed representing $500,000 in
revenue per year, Avaya patient workflow solutions can provide a net
benefit of $1m for an average 300-400 bed hospital.
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