Press Releases
InterSystems Helps Innovative Australian Medical Software
Developer To Win Inventory Management Tender
At The Children’s Hospital at Westmead
Sydney-based Medical Systems Design benefits from InterSystems’ underlying database and integration platform to win open tender applying to all NSW public hospitals
Sydney, Aust. — July 19, 2006 — InterSystems Corporation today announced that Medical Systems Design’s SurgiDat® software application based on its CACHÉ post-relational database and Ensemble universal integration platform has been selected in an open tender by The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney to provide a new inventory and sterilisation management system for its 26,000 surgical instruments.
SurgiDat application can now also be purchased by other public hospitals in New South Wales without further tenders.
SurgiDat is being used by The Children’s Hospital at Westmead to efficiently manage its surgical instruments, a critical task as medical practitioners will not use an instrument unless they verify that it has been correctly sterilised and maintained in an appropriate state before a medical procedure.
"When a Melbourne hospital’s deceased patient was confirmed to have had Creutzfeldt-Jakob [Mad Cow] Disease they had no way of knowing which instruments were used," said Todd Kemp, a Founder of Medical Systems Design. "They had to destroy every surgical instrument of that specialty in the hospital to ensure there was no contamination. With SurgiDat they would only have had to destroy the 350 or so instruments which had actually been used on the deceased patient.”
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead had long been aware of these risks and in the mid 1990s obtained a system capable of managing its instrument fleet. The vendor of this software does not, however, provide an upgrade path for its products, which run on Windows NT. Problems maintaining ageing servers were compounded by the fact Microsoft no longer supports the operating system.
“It just became unacceptable from a risk management point of view,” said Graham King, Nursing Unit Manager, Sterilisation Services Unit. “We were down two working computers and our turnaround time jumped to eight hours from the time we received instruments in the dirty area to get them back into the theatres. Traditionally we could do that in less than four hours. We were starting to run out of instruments and we had to put off cases.”
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead therefore decided a new solution must be acquired and staged a public tender for the project. A key requirement of the tender was that the solution be operable without adding staff.
“If we went back to not tracking instruments I would have to employ five more staff,” said King. “With inventory tracking, the computer acts as the check. One person can assemble a set of instruments for an operation, without needing a second person to check.”
After evaluating eight submissions, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead selected SurgiDat, as it offered a comprehensive range of functions which best met the tender specifications with the lowest ongoing cost of ownership.
SurgiDat ® lowers operating costs thanks to its patented use of a 2D data matrix barcode on a tiny 2.2mm square of porcelain laser bonded to each instrument. Bonding costs just $AUD0.80 per instrument, compared with $AUD5.00 to laser etch instruments as required by the old software – a substantial saving as some hospitals have in excess of 600,000 instruments. The SurgiDat UID unique global identification system can then record the sterilisation process, and every time and on which patient an instrument is used.
SurgiDat is enabling new innovations, including storing and displaying photos of instruments, which speeds the picking and packing process, and support for touch screen computers, which have proved much easier to use in the hospital’s dirty areas than PCs with keyboards. There are also plans to integrate SurgiDat to the hospital’s patient administration system (PAS) using InterSystems’ Ensemble enabling technology.
The new solution has also proven impressively flexible, thanks to InterSystems’ underlying database and integration technologies, in helping The Children’s Hospital at Westmead benchmark its inventory management system to ensure it operates the most efficient sterilisation practices.
SurgiDat’s recent extension to include the InterSystems Ensemble universal integration platform gave Medical Systems Design an edge over competitors in cost-effectively meeting The Children’s Hospital at Westmead’s requirements. “SurgiDat is one of the few healthcare software suites with inbuilt integration capabilities,” said MSD’s Todd Kemp. Another key benefit is Ensemble’s built in HL7 health messaging compliance, a fundamental healthcare facility requirement.
SurgiDat’s inbuilt integration capabilities meant the new system easily captured all the information built up in The Children’s Hospital at Westmead’s earlier solution.
“The NSW Health Department is benchmarking sterilisation efficiency at different hospitals,” said King from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. “Because surgeons require different sets of instruments for different operations, we give every instrument a weighting. A spoon has a weighting of one and a very complex instrument has a weighting of ten. You can then measure apples with apples across different hospitals.
“We have entered weightings for 5000 to 6000 items. I can print out the weightings for a month and send a report to NSW Health. They divide by our wages bill and see the prices for sterilisation. Ours is 16c per item, others range up to 92c per item.
“The old system meant we could capture most of the weighting data,” King said. “But in the new system the weightings are in the database and it is so much easier. If other hospitals come on board, the weightings will already have been done. The next hospital won’t have to take the photos either. All they will have to do is create their own lists of instruments.
“One of SurgiDat’s big pluses is that it runs on CACHÉ,” King said. “A lot of systems in NSW run on a CACHÉ database and our computer guys are very familiar with it.”
The new system is making a positive impact where it is needed most: inside operating theatres. “The previous system was more labour intensive all round,” he said.
“SurgiDat and CACHÉ saves time in theatre when we want our people to be focussed on the patient at all times. It means our nurses are doing the right job – looking after the patient and the Doctor – instead of fussing with instruments.”
MSD’s Kemp is another fan of the InterSystems CACHÉ post-relational database.
“SurgiDat can quickly generate enormous quantities of live data. With CACHÉ we know we can go to 32 terabytes – and with much lower hardware costs compared to other databases,” said Kemp. “We have also benefited from faster application development times and a faster, more robust application.
“But the bottom line is what it delivers to the customer,” he said. ”With InterSystems’ CACHÉ and Ensemble, the customer does not incur big expenses in ongoing maintenance or integration.”
About Medical Systems Design
Medical Systems Design is based in Sydney, Australia. In 2002 the company created the SurgiDat® family of healthcare management solutions to deliver integrated clinical data collection and surgical inventory management for the high production healthcare environment. Collecting business intelligence data in real time, SurgiDat integrates with enterprise financial management and supply chain/logistics applications to provide an instantaneous, automated record of the complete activities within a department, or even across an entire group of healthcare facilities.
Within Australia the company’s customers include Mater Misericordiae Health Services Brisbane (a group of seven Public and Private hospitals), the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Adelaide, Calvary Health Care Adelaide and National Day Surgery, the newest surgical facility in NSW, which is now adopting SurgiDat for all stock management, clinical and inventory quality control.
For more information please visit www.surgidat.com.au.
About InterSystems
InterSystems Corporation is a privately-held US$200,000,000 company with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. and offices in 22 countries. InterSystems CACHÉ® is a high performance object database that makes applications faster and more scalable. InterSystems Ensemble® is a rapid integration platform that enriches applications with new functionality, and makes them connectable. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a platform that leverages existing healthcare applications to rapidly create regional or national electronic health records.
InterSystems is the predominant vendor of database and integration software for healthcare applications. CACHÉ and Ensemble are used as the core technology for clinical applications in thousands of hospitals around the world, including all U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense hospitals, and the Kaiser Permanente network. Leading software vendors who build clinical application products with InterSystems' technologies include Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Misys Healthcare, QuadraMed, and many more. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.
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Editorial Contact
Chris Bowes
Bowes Communications
(02) 9387 2332
Chris.Bowes@BowesPR.com
