Reducing the Costs of Providing Healthcare

Microsoft Smart Client technologies help streamline administration and eliminate duplication by giving medical practitioners any time, anywhere access toup-to-date patient records.

Access to complete and accurate patient records minimises the unnecessary expense of duplicate tests, procedures and consultations.
With a complete picture of healthcare operations enabled through Microsoft business intelligence technologies, managers can plan more effectively, deploy resources more efficiently and respond faster to changing needs.
Microsoft communication and collaboration technologies also help to reduce the cost of healthcare training and ongoing information dissemination for new best practices, statutory requirements, health alerts, cautionary advice and so on.

Case Study

By introducing a Microsoft knowledge-driven healthcare solution, one consortium of 20 hospitals experienced a 75 percent reduction in the cost of handling diagnostic images.

Using the Microsoft platform, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre designed iSite Enterprise, a digital picture archiving communication system (PACS) to capture and manage patient images across the consortium of 20 hospitals. Patient images can be viewed in the emergency room, the sports clinic, the orthopaedics, cardiology and ENT departments - as well as at the physician's practice or home. The system can download images from more than 145 kilometres away in less than two seconds and supports thousands of concurrent users. The ability to transfer diagnostic images electronically also saves time when dealing with serious trauma cases transferred from smaller hospitals.

Key benefits

There has been a 75 percent reduction in the cost of handling diagnostic images since going 'filmless'.
The always-online architecture has eliminated the immeasurable, yet major, costs of not having access to the required images and information at the point of patient care.
Digital images offer better diagnostic tools than film, improving outcomes.
Patient wait times have been reduced by more than 50 percent because the images can be delivered instantly at an enterprise level.

Key Microsoft technologies
iSite enterprise PACS was developed with Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 (US Link)

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 serves as the data store
on a Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
MSCI cluster. (US Links)

Windows Load Balancing (US Link) is used for scalability on the Windows Internet Information Server Web Servers on the presentation tier.

"We've reduced imaging costs from an average of $20 per case to $6 per case.
We handle about one million imaging cases per year, so the savings could be up to $14 million annually."

Dan Drawbaugh, Chief Information Officer, University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre

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