The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
Children’s Hospital Improves Access to Patient Records using SQL Server Solution
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Company Overview
In 1875 a Toronto woman named Elizabeth McMaster rented an 11-room house in downtown Toronto for $320 a year, set up six iron cots, and declared open a hospital "for the admission and treatment of all sick children." It was only the second hospital in the world dedicated specifically to the needs of children.
Business Challenge
The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) has grown dramatically since McMaster accepted her first patient, a three-year old burn victim named Maggie. Today, SickKids is Canada’s largest children’s health institution. The hospital employs more than 5,000 staff, and handles nearly 50,000 emergency room visits and a combined 321,131 ambulatory and inpatient visits each year.
Among the many crucial systems the hospital relies on is one that supports its patient records. With such a large volume of complex patients, hospital staff must have up-to-date patient histories available to them at all times and in any location within the building.
“Quite often when patients arrive for treatment — whether for a scheduled appointment or an emergency — the chart is required at the same time by multiple health care professionals, which poses a challenge with a paper-based system, as there is only one hard copy,” says Debi Senger, director of health records, SickKids.
Patients often move between different areas of the hospital during their visit. With a paper-based records system keeping track of more and more patients, it is a challenge to ensure files are in the right place at the right time.
Finding adequate storage space for all the files was another challenge. “We are currently using hospital space to store patient files. Using offsite storage was prohibitively expensive, given that SickKids pulls an estimated 60,000 charts per year for research purposes alone – and every time a chart is retrieved or returned, we incur cost. In addition we incur an expense every year to microfilm or microfiche our old records,” Senger says.
The hospital wanted to find a way to simplify and streamline patient record management, and do so in a way that would be easy for time-strapped medical staff to use.
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Solution
As a large institution with a number of sophisticated business processes supporting a wide variety of tasks, SickKids’ IT strategy is to rely on software that can integrate quickly and easily with existing infrastructure while meeting the functional needs of its staff.
“We are looking for a product that offers the best functionality from a business perspective and a platform that can assist us in meeting our goals,” says Ana Andresian, technology director, SickKids.
To find the most suitable solution, SickKids sought assistance from document management experts and Microsoft technology partner Microdea Inc, which recommended its Synergize™ Electronic Patient Chart (EPC) system based on Microsoft® SQL Server™2000.
“We knew that Microsoft SQL Server in conjunction with our solution would provide the perfect platform to support the EPC system,” said Colin Ruskin, Vice President of Business Development Microdea. “It easily integrated with the hospital’s existing systems and is robust enough to handle the long-term demands of the patient charting system.”
SickKids was particularly attracted to the failover clustering features contained in SQL Server 2000, which are designed to help ensure continuous uptime. In the event of a server failure, SQL Server 2000 can transfer critical resources stored in a failing machine to another, pre-configured server. This helps ensure minimal risk of downtime for users.
With EPC, patient files are scanned into the database 24 to 48 hours post-visit. Records from May 2000 onward are available on EPC, giving doctors a solid patient history. Because data is stored in an electronic format, multiple users can view patient records simultaneously and instantly via hospital workstations, as opposed to everyone vying for a single paper chart.
Business Benefits
By adding an electronic system, the patient records are available to multiple users at the same time.
Enhanced patient care
Medical staff can now view critical patient data instantly with EPC. Instead of ferrying documents around the hospital as patients move from ward to ward, doctors can access records at the click of a workstation button. As well, doctors can view the same file at the same time – and in different locations.
“We’ve heard a lot of great feedback about EPC from our staff, who are very impressed with it. It is particularly vital in an emergency situation, where speed is an issue. EPC gives them what they need without delay,” says Senger.
Less paper, more security
SickKids expects that over the long term, EPC will help reduce the amount of valuable space it must reserve for document storage.
“Today we need over 1,200 linear feet annually to be devoted to storage, just because of the growth in the number of patients - and charts - that we handle. The long term plan is that as soon as we scan a chart into EPC, that paper copy will be destroyed,” says Senger.
Reducing the hospital’s reliance on paper will do more than simply free up valuable space. EPC is also helping SickKids improve its record-auditing process and protect its patient data.
“Using EPC, we can track exactly who accessed a particular patient’s data at the document level and for what purpose. It provides us with an additional layer of security because we have an audit log in place that records this information,” says Senger.
Reliable, affordable platform
By taking advantage of SQL Server 2000 clustering capabilities, EPC has never experienced any performance or reliability issues, even when large volumes of data are entered into the system and accessed by more than 2,500 users in a high-demand environment. This is important as SickKids continues to expand the use of EPC in the future, most notably into its operating rooms.
SQL Server 2000 also offers SickKids the least-costly licensing option – a consideration in an industry where tight resources are a given.
“Although we use SQL Server at SickKids, we definitely looked at other solutions before deciding on EPC. Being a publicly funded institution, we always look for systems that are cost-effective,” says Andresian.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft® Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about The Hospital for Sick Children, please visit the Web site at: www.sickkids.ca
For more information about Microdea and its products and services call (905) 881-6071 or visit the web site at: www.microdea.com
