Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Misys Healthcare Systems develops and supports software and related services designed to help physicians and other caregivers manage the complexities of healthcare and better care for their patients. Misys designs and develops a broad line of software and services and provides them to more than 110,000 physicians in 18,000 practice locations and 1,200 hospitals; home health providers at more than 600 homecare agencies; and hundreds of commercial laboratories, clinics, managed services organizations, integrated delivery networks, and other related organizations. Misys Healthcare Systems is a division of Misys PLC, which provides software products and related services to customers in more than 120 countries.
 | At Misys we have two things that drive us. One, we want to create great software that makes healthcare work better and two, we want to lead our industry in customer satisfaction, growth, and total shareholder return. |  |
Marc Winchester Senior Vice President, Market Development, Misys Healthcare Systems |
The company’s flagship product family focuses on electronic health record (EHR) solutions for use in the hospital setting, physicians’ office, homecare agency, or mobile homecare setting. The EHR product family supports a fully integrated workflow, from patient check-in through point-of-care and check-out, including practice management and billing.
The primary goal of Misys products and services is to ensure healthcare providers are connected to comprehensive and up-to-date patient records, when and where the information is needed, so they can make the wisest clinical decisions.
To achieve this objective, Misys is always evaluating ways to make its industry-leading mobile solutions easy to use, as well as easy to develop, maintain, and easily upgradeable with more technologically advanced features.
The solutions Misys develops, for the gamut of care settings and all operational facets, needs to run on hardware platforms ranging from clustered servers in a large hospital to a single desktop or portable computer in a solo physician practice, from the most sophisticated Tablet PC to the simplest handheld PDA.
The solution also must provide seamless interoperability among the component products within it and with third-party products, such as legacy laboratory information systems or medical practice management systems.
Interoperability, ensuring that all components of the solution communicate effectively with each other, is the single biggest challenge facing suppliers of healthcare-information products. If a patient is under the care of more than one physician, it is vital that the EHR and related information be easily shared among all healthcare professionals working with the patient and with whatever other information management solutions the physicians might already have installed.
This means that when it’s time to enhance the Misys solution to integrate with newly emerging products, software developers must have an integrated and robust environment in which to work and one that is widely familiar in the profession.
A related need, ease of maintenance and product feature enhancement, is crucial for being able to offer a solution and follow-up support in the price range that many private healthcare professionals and administrators at medical facilities require.
Finally, the solution must support the kind of user interaction that makes it easily accessible in a variety of settings.
At the core of the Misys Healthcare System mission is providing healthcare professionals, in all care settings, with the most user friendly and efficient resources possible.
"At Misys we have two things that drive us. One, we want to create great software that makes healthcare work better and, two, we want to lead our industry in customer satisfaction, growth, and total shareholder return," Marc Winchester, Senior Vice President, Market Development, explained.
The company's industry-leading EHR solution offering, MISYS Connect, is a computerized patient record management system that allows all healthcare providers treating a patient to enter data at their location and share it throughout the system. It integrates with the full array of Misys solution offerings that improve scheduling, billing, and other operations and helps accomplish a total office automated solution.
"With MISYS Connect, we can literally connect information from the hospital system to the physician office and to the home care agency where a nurse could be using a MISYS home care application to capture data. So we share that information across those three venues of care and provide the most current information to people providing care for the patient," Winchester added.
MISYS Connect is designed to be easy to use as well as both time- and cost-effective so healthcare professionals will find it indispensable in their daily activities.
| Our focus is on the clinician and getting the clinician the tools they need. | |
Betty Feth President, Misys Homecare Systems |
"Doctors are very busy people and one of the things that we need to do is make our products as simple and easy to use as possible. They need to be intuitive and they need to be highly usable, otherwise these physicians just won't pick up the device and use it at all," noted Tyler Patterson, Vice President, Product Management.
Winchester agreed: "We try to give them good tools that make it easier for them to do their job, give them a good interface that's pleasant for them to use and make them more efficient. When people go to work, they want something that's easy to use and helps them get their work done in a more rapid and efficient manner and I think our tools do that."
The ease-of-use requirement also means that developing, maintaining, and upgrading the solution must be accomplished expeditiously. The development team at Misys Healthcare Systems, which recently migrated from its legacy Java environment to a Microsoft development system, has found this process to be trouble-free.
Neal Reizer, Director, Research and Development, says the choice of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework was an obvious one, considering the challenges his team faced. "The Microsoft .NET family of technology has really helped us to move seamlessly across the platforms and just let us focus on the customer experience."
Ensuring interoperability in the field of healthcare often translates into vital real-world consequences. “When a patient enters the emergency room at two in the morning, the physician wants to be able to go to one EHR solution and find out all there is to know regarding the patient’s history. Our solutions must interoperate with other products already in use and others still to come in order to deliver this capability,” Mike Pritts, Vice President, Research and Development noted.
While developing pioneering information technology solutions for the healthcare industry, Misys has both provided added value for its clients and realized benefits for itself in several areas.
Utilizing Microsoft technologies, Misys developers were the first to come to market with a unique healthcare industry solution for a PDA.
"That is something that we're very proud of," Reizer noted.
| The Microsoft .NET family of technology has really helped us to move seamlessly across the platforms and just let us focus on the customer experience. | |
Neal Reizer Director, Research and Development, Misys Healthcare Systems |
Home-bound patients have significantly benefited from these technological advancements. Previously home healthcare providers would need to refer to paper files and take hand-written notes during a visit to a patient’s home. Now information is conveniently available on a mobile device at the time of the visit. Clinicians can more accurately determine if the patient is following previous advice, can assess the results, and advise on new options. This results in higher quality patient care. Now there is no need to take notes on paper and have the information manually entered into the system at a later time-with an increased possibility of data entry errors.
"Our focus really is on the clinician and getting the clinician the tools that they need to be able to provide care in the patient's home," Betty Feth, President of Misys Homecare Systems, another division in the company, explained. "These clinicians really care about the patient and for them to walk into the home knowing that the information they have is current, is essential to them."
The competitive advantage of enabling Misys developers to work more productively because they have the right tools has helped increased morale at Misys, another people-ready benefit.
“It increases the morale of developers when they’re working with best-of-breed tools like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, and are able to collaborate and produce code efficiently,” Pritts noted.
“A key part of our strategy is enticing the best and brightest talent, and people just naturally want to work in a place that helps them to keep their skills current in a widely used and respected technology,” Pritts added.
Winchester agreed: "Because we do use a lot of what I would call cutting-edge technology, our people enjoy working on those products and enjoy building them and they know that they have an effect, not just on the people that use them-the physicians and caregivers-but the end result of all of that being an effect, a positive effect on patients and on health care delivery in the United States."
Both the company's current and future needs are addressed through its adoption of the Microsoft .NET Framework, according to Reizer. This includes software developed by other software companies specifically for the healthcare care industry, such as specialized speech recognition features. Because Microsoft authoring tools are an industry standard, specialized software components can be efficiently integrated into Misys products without the need for a large investment of time and effort in developing and testing.
"As a result, the Microsoft technologies have opened up solutions that were simply not possible before,” Reizer added.
Patterson agreed. "From a forward-looking technology perspective, we know that we can rely on Microsoft to take us and our platform where we need to go in the future."
"Partnering with Microsoft gives us confidence as an organization that we can deliver the right product at the right time to a market which is growing probably somewhere between 15 and 20 percent a year. And we will be able to capitalize on that growth over the next 3 to 5 years," Winchester observed.
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