Hospitals using IT to improve service

The role of IT in hospitals has become strategic and is now seen as a competitive advantage, rather than being just for cost-savings, according to the visiting CIO of University Hospitals of the Catholic University Leuven, Belgium, Prof Bart van den Bosch. The hospital CIO was in Bangkok recently to address a conference on healthcare information systems organised by Cisco Systems.

He told the audience that the best technology approach to take was an integrated, architected one that tries to avoid vertical silos.

At the University Hospitals of Catholic University Leuven, which comprises over 2,400 beds, the main workflow is under central control and is a modular, open system that was developed in-house, being written in Java and to Java community standards.

The challenge for hospitals today, the CIO said, lay in how to tie together disparate systems, where there was a need for a single view of information from different healthcare systems such as radiology, laboratory, cardiology or patient-tracking systems, each of which had the tendency to become a silo - and, once created, these silos needed to be bridged, if possible.

The best way to avoid this problem altogether would be to start by looking at integration issues when a new hospital is built, and by discussing these issues up front. And sometimes, "best-of-breed" solutions were not such a good idea since they usually were not designed around or built to open standards, Prof van den Bosch noted.

He addressed some 40 CIOs and CEOs of Thai hospitals in the first event to be organised here by Cisco Systems Healthcare Solutions Group, which was the fastest growing vertical within Cisco, according to its Singapore-based healthcare business solutions manager, Vincent Lim.

The networking giant is working with partners ranging from small niche players to large system integrators such as IBM, HP and Fujitsu to provide IP-based solutions for hospitals. These ranged from using IP-based video for collaborative care, such as in helping to resolve language barriers for patients, to presence servers linked to Wi-Fi enabled handsets carried by physicians or the deployment of ruggedised IP phones for nurses.

Hospitals here were now starting to do networking and were beginning to install wireless infrastructure, where many innovative applications could be implemented, Lim noted, although he conceded that IT departments in Thai hospitals tended to be "pretty small", while a big opportunity lay in taking an integrated approach to architecting and deploying a centralised IT system.

In the region, Australia, New Zealand and Korea were the most forward-looking in consolidating their medical information systems, he said, and he also noted how IT in hospitals would increasingly be used for competitive advantage.

Computerisation at the University Hospitals of the Catholic Univeristy of Leuven was presented to the delegates as both a connectivity story around networking with 15,000 end-points, as well as for its widespread embrace of open standards that enables application connectivity, where all patient data resided on a central Sybase database on a Sun server.

Prof van den Bosch said that all storage had already been virtualized on Network Appliance hardware while the hospital's Dell servers were now in the process of being virtualised and he said this should reach 80-90 percent in one to two years.

Physicians were now able to perform order entry on-screen into a single medical prescription system, thereby reducing error and boosting efficiency by doing away with paper, he said.

The hospital had a total of 8,300 employees, with 1,000 physicians, 4,000 nurses and an IT staff of 88 full-time employees, along with some part time staff. Its IT expenses amounted to two percent of revenues, he said. All the development work was being done in-house, taking a modular approach and providing incremental upgrades in an agile development environment that had seen over 700 releases since 1994, or an average of one upgrade a week, he said.

Having a system developed in-house provided many benefits, not the least being the ability to add new features when needed, he added.