Business Needs

Healthcare providers insure the quality of their patient care by mapping out specific checklists and procedures for each common patient scenario.  Often large providers with multiple facilities have different procedures for patient care related to a specific geography or legacy procedures due to mergers of healthcare systems.  These plans are referred to as a ‘Plan of Care’ for patients or ‘Order Sets’ for internal medical staff.  These plans and procedures help healthcare providers deliver a consistent patient experience while ensuring that medical staffs follow established procedures.

Every condition or scenario ranging from children’s ear infections to emergency cardiac arrest would be covered by a specific plan.  As new therapies, devices, and pharmaceutical treatments become available healthcare providers regularly review procedures and plans in order to provide optimal care.  Traditionally this requires regular meetings of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, administrators, and management teams for defined healthcare practices such as Neonatal, Cardiac, Infectious Diseases, Emergency, Geriatric, and many more.  These regular meetings typically drain valuable time from healthcare professionals and consume large amounts of paperwork and administrative time.  This time consuming task is multiplied when large healthcare providers have divergent plans depending on hospital locations.

Solution 

Eastridge Technology works with medium and large healthcare providers to create cost effective solutions for automated policy management with Microsoft SharePoint 2007 & 2010 and Nintex Workflow 2007 & 2010. 

Many healthcare providers today are using SharePoint internally on a small scale, but depend on legacy document management systems that require manual intervention.  Those providers that do have documents inside of SharePoint document libraries rarely have an effective workflow model that automates meetings, approvals, publishing, and notification of changes.

Eastridge works with providers to refine or create document management containers, metadata, workflow, and security settings by defining customized Nintex Workflows within  SharePoint.  For some customers this requires integration into existing healthcare document management systems, but for most customers this exercise is a straightforward mapping from manual file shares to managed sites and document libraries.

Benefits

Healthcare provider IT departments that are utilizing SharePoint and Nintex report a significantly faster build, deploy, and modification cycle for new SharePoint document management sites and workflows.  The straightforward layout of the Nintex workflow tools allows business analysts to mock up or even create workflows without the use of software development tools.

End users of these patient policy management solutions for ‘Order Sets’ and ‘Plan of Care’ enjoy a simplified way of reviewing, capturing comments, approving or denying, and reporting for regular policy review meetings.  In some cases customers have eliminated the standard in-person meetings in favor of tracking responses and approvals through a SharePoint document management site powered by Nintex Workflow.