Integration & Implementation
There are two areas of integration to consider when selecting an automated perioperative and anesthesia solution for your operating rooms. They are:
- How well does the system integrate with applications outside of the Perioperative department?
- How well integrated is the system within the Perioperative/Anesthesia area?
Integration within the Perioperative and Anesthesia areas
While some data must be shared outside the walls of the Perioperative department, even more data needs to be shared within the confines of those walls. Unlike HIS vendors, SIS includes the entire perioperative continuum, including Anesthesia, on one database.
From Pre-op to PACU, the patient’s data is stored in one database with SIS. This means no interfaces whatsoever in this critical area where most of the data is being shared. This enables you to analyze and report on any data that resides in the Perioperative area without having to go to your IT department or the vendor for help.
You’ll also benefit from the lack of unsynchronized, out-of-date information in the Perioperative area and no double data entry. In other words, this means higher productivity and safer patients!
We are more than just fully integrated with Eclipsys – we are Eclipsys’ OR system.
As such, using SIS with Eclipsys means:
- Single sign on between us and Eclipsys’ other applications
- Key Patient data automatically sent to and from SIS and Eclipsys’ other clinical applications
- Alerts automatically sent to SIS from based on information/events that take place in other Eclipsys applications and the fact the alert was opened is noted in Eclipsys documentation (even when it is opened in SIS)
We understand that interfacing is a big concern for hospitals today. Everyone knows being able to share data in real time between various departments is critical to hospital profits and patient safety. Many hospitals have turned to their HIS vendor to gain this enterprise-wide data sharing capability.
The fact is that HIS systems simply cannot meet the unique needs of the OR. Also, there are often serious integration problems within the HIS system – HIS interfaces are not “seamless” or “behind the scenes” as many claim to be. Click here to read more about the truth behind HIS integration.
As a best-of-breed vendor we have much more experience interfacing to other applications because we’ve had to do this for each and every one of our clients. Interfacing is a fact of life for us, and we have put tremendous resources into perfecting our interface capabilities.
We have designed our product to make interfacing as easy as possible. One way we’ve done this by staying up-to-date with and incorporating all of the major health IT data standards into our products. These standards include HL7, HIPPA, and SNOWMED. Also, we’ve formed partnerships with a number of companies to help with interfacing. These companies include Iatrix, Microsystems, Sentillion, StatCom and Eclipsys.
To date SIS has successfully completed over 700 interfaces. These interfaces include key applications such as EMRs, Enterprise scheduling, financial management systems, and supply chain tools. Vendors include Siemens, McKesson, Cerner, Meditech, Eclipsys, IDX to name just a few.
HIS Systems Cannot Meet All of a Hospital’s Needs:
Many (if not all) analysts and industry experts agree there is no one HIS system that has strong functionality for every area of the hospital. This is especially true when it comes to Perioperative and Anesthesia Systems. Because these areas are more complex than other parts of the hospital and because they have so many requirements that are different from other areas of the hospital (such as block scheduling, preference card setup, surgeon notes, surgery specific JCAHO rules, pain management, etc.) they require a level of expertise that is not found in HIS vendors.
Furthermore, the OR is crucial to the hospital’s bottom line – generating about 60% of all hospital revenue and the majority of the costs. Having the best Perioperative system possible is critical. Frost and Sullivan stated this best in their 2006 “Acute Care Market” study. In this paper they state,
“Enterprise Information Systems, however, do not typically have the depth of features that Surgery and Anesthesia require to manage their environments and capture essential patient data, sometimes as required by government regulations, as in the case of anesthesiology and the FDA.”
HIS systems do not share data seamlessly
Our clients who have replaced HIS OR systems with ours tell us they have the same number of interfaces to support with SIS. This makes sense given the fact that most HIS vendors have grown by acquiring other companies rather than by developing new products on their own. When they acquire products from other companies, they have to interface these products to their own.
We investigated these interfaces further and found these HIS interfaces are not “behind the scenes” or “seamless”. Rather, hospitals have to apply patches to update their interfaces whenever database changes are made to their various HIS applications. Also, because the HIS system is composed of interfaced software packages, they face serious limitations with the data that can be shared between the various departmental applications. Furthermore, they suffer from data that is often out-of-sync between the various databases.
This is why our customers and others say a well-interfaced best-of-breed OR system is better than a poorly integrated HIS application.