4-page Case Study - Posted 1/8/2007

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System C

Healthcare Solutions Provider Adds Value to Patient Administration System

System C, which provides clinical information systems and services to healthcare providers, is adding value to its comprehensive patient administration system. The product, currently known as Medway, is being rewritten using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system to provide users with a range of new functionality. Healthcare professionals can now manage their appointments and schedule more effectively using a familiar interface. The new technology also offers users value-added features for producing letters and collecting and inputting patient information. Integration with the 2007 Office system has enhanced the solution in ways previously impossible and reduced the development life cycle by several months.

Situation

System C is an independent IT company that delivers clinical information systems and services to the United Kingdom (U.K.) healthcare sector. System C services include data migration and data cleansing and the implementation of electronic patient record systems and patient administration systems (PAS). The company serves a wide range of healthcare organisations in primary care, acute services, community services, mental health services, and social services.

Where previously it took six months for two people to build screens for capturing patient data, delivering superior functionality with InfoPath 2007 has taken just one month. Masami Torii, Product Development Director, System C

• Advanced PAS functionality, including live bed-state support, flexible multi-disciplinary scheduling, and integrated extended clinical functionality, such as accident and emergency, theatres, radiology, and maternity. 
• Integrated requesting and results support for pathology, radiology, and other user-definable services. 
• Integrated clinical support, including PACS image viewing, document imaging, comprehensive clinical noting and documentation facilities, prescribing, and a unique English-language clinical encoder. 
• Advanced confidentiality and security routines supporting role-based access to patient data. 
• Compatibility with the NHS Care Records Service.

The Medway product, which currently runs on a proprietary database infrastructure, was developed using existing technologies and the C++ programming language. To ensure it continues to meet the needs of administrative and clinical users, System C is rewriting all elements of the solution using the Microsoft® .NET Framework version 2.0 and plans to release early modules of the new product by mid 2007.

One key aim of this exercise is to fully integrate Medway with commonly used Microsoft desktop productivity tools used for e-mail, work scheduling, and word processing. In addition, System C wants to help clinicians access their personal diaries and their hospital work schedules through a single, familiar, highly intuitive interface.

System C aims to reduce development times and costs required to create and deploy new Medway features. The ability to draw on functionality already available with the Microsoft Office system is key to achieving this objective.

Solution

System C was invited to take part in the Rapid Adopter Programme for the 2007 Office system. This programme gave the company access to Microsoft engineers with in-depth knowledge of the new technology. After joining the programme, a potential solution was scoped by employees from System C and Microsoft and a proof of concept was developed at the Microsoft Technology Center.

The two-week proof of concept process demonstrated the possibilities for the integration of 2007 Office system applications with the Medway product. Masami Torii, Product Development Director at System C, says: “This period of work was very intense. Four of our internal developers worked closely with four Microsoft developers and one Microsoft architect, allowing us to get a clear idea of the potential of the 2007 Office system.”

After developing the proof of concept, System C began the task of integrating existing Medway modules with Microsoft Office system functionality. It plans to integrate the following technologies with Medway features to enhance the experience of end users:

Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007—used to display clinicians’ personal and hospital work schedules in a fully integrated interface. In addition to viewing appointments for the day in a single location, authorised employees can click on icons to enter and view patients’ clinical histories and other relevant information. They can also reschedule or cancel appointments quickly and efficiently using the highly intuitive Outlook 2007 interface. The existing hospital calendar application is integrated with Outlook 2007 using XML Web services.

Microsoft Office Word 2007—the existing Medway product generates a range of clinical and clerical letters. While Microsoft Word is used to display and print such letters, System C had to develop its own word processor to create the letter templates and healthcare professionals had to learn how to use it. Now, exposed elements of code in Word 2007, and the use of XML storage, have allowed System C to eliminate the need for a separate template editor. As a result, users can create complex clinical documents in real time with a fully integrated, feature-rich and familiar word processor.

Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007—Medway relies on user-defined soft screens called “proformas” to collect data relating to patients, for instance during and after appointments with doctors. Instead of re-developing the existing proprietary proforma screens that healthcare workers need to collect this data, System C has integrated InfoPath 2007 to help them create their own templates in real time. While mandatory fields in InfoPath templates make sure clinicians enter consistent and accurate patient data, users can also pull optional fields from a convenient side bar if they need to input additional or non-standard details.

In addition to these technologies, System C is integrating the Medway database seamlessly with new 2007 Office system applications. Information such as patient allergies and addresses or any other structured file in the database is now exposed to clinicians in real time using familiar Microsoft interfaces.

Benefits

System C is offering healthcare professionals a range of new, value-added tools for work scheduling, word processing, and information gathering. The company has also made patient data available in an intuitive, integrated way, thereby helping medical professionals enhance the overall quality of patient care.

Improved Time Management for Clinicians
Typically, clinicians have two diaries: one is a personal diary, often accessed using Microsoft Outlook; the other is a hospital diary integrated into PAS and managed by administrative employees. As a result, it was difficult to gain an accurate view of appointments throughout the day and impossible to view both personal and hospital diaries on a single screen.

The next-generation Medway product is fully integrated with Outlook 2007, allowing clinicians to view, merge, and manage appointments in both diaries on a single screen. This ensures doctors and other staff can plan their time effectively and personal and work appointments are not missed because of poor visibility.

“The ability to deliver an integrated view of appointments adds significant value to our users and is an excellent selling point for the new version of Medway,” Torii says. “It would have been virtually impossible to achieve previously, but we were able to do this very quickly and cost effectively by integrating with Office 2007 using Web services.”

Word Integration Saves Time, Improves Functionality
To offer Medway users a range of letter templates that comply with healthcare regulations, System C had developed its own word processor. This required significant development time and investment and offered users none of the familiar word processing tools available with Microsoft Word.

By contrast, the new product offers all the functionality benefits of Word 2007, while eliminating the need for custom development. “Because code is exposed in the latest version of Word, we have been able to integrate it with Medway quickly and easily,” Torii says.

“Writing and maintaining our own word processor was very difficult and time consuming. Now, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we can give our customers access to excellent Word 2007 functionality quickly and easily. To illustrate this, previously it took one person three months to create a custom-built word processor. By contrast, integration with Word 2007 was a simple configuration exercise that took one person just three weeks.”

Improved Data Capture Enhances Patient Care
Medway helps clinicians collect data relating to patients and their medical conditions. In the past, proprietary “proforma” soft screens were designed to allow users to input additional data, but these could sometimes be time-consuming to design and adapt, making them inflexible to use. By contrast, the new version is fully integrated with InfoPath 2007, which allows clinicians and administrative employees to create customised soft screens quickly for capturing patient data.

“All the development code we used to help clinicians capture patient data has now been replaced with InfoPath 2007 forms,” Torii says. “This provides standard fields that ensure the quality of patient data and allows employees to drag and drop additional fields from an intuitive list at the side of their screens.

“While it requires significant development time and effort to configure and adapt specialist data-input screens, we can now offer a much more flexible system quickly and cost effectively. Where previously it took six months for two people to build screens for capturing patient data, delivering superior functionality with InfoPath 2007 has taken just one month.”

Intuitive Interface Increases Saleability, Speeds Adoption
Clinicians can be reluctant to adopt new technologies that require extensive training. For this reason, the integration of existing clinical functionality with familiar applications in the Microsoft Office system will encourage fast adoption among healthcare professionals and become a key selling point for the system.

“Most people have some experience working with Microsoft Office system applications,” Torii says. “By giving people access to specialist clinical functionality using these familiar tools, we are adding significant value to our product set. In addition, we are reducing resistance to new technologies while helping all healthcare professionals work more productively.”

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
.NET Framework 3.0 is Microsoft’s managed-code programming model for developing software on the Windows platform. It builds on the .NET Framework 2.0, combining the power of the existing .NET Framework 2.0 application programming interfaces with new technologies for building applications that provide visually stunning user experiences, seamless interoperable communications, and the ability to model a range of business processes. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace technologies. It provides a consistent and familiar development experience, bringing new technology to the millions of developers programming in managed code today. For more information about the .NET Framework 3.0, please go to: www.microsoft.com/netframework

For More Information

For further information about Microsoft products and services please visit www.microsoft.com/uk or call 0870 60 10 100*.

For hearing impaired customers with a Minicom contact: 0870 50 30 400*.

*Lines are open 8am-6pm Monday to Friday. Please note Numbers prefixed 0870 will be charged at national call rates. For details of national call rate charges please contact your telecoms provider.

For more information about System C products and services, visit the Web site at: www.systemc.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published December 2006