ASG-Cypress: Streamlining Information for University of Pennsylvania Health System
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Pennsylvania, USA
A leader in medicine for more than 240 years, the University of Pennsylvania opened its School of Medicine, the nation's first, in 1765. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was established in 1874 as the nation's first teaching hospital. Since its founding days, it has expanded medical frontiers by creating some of the nation's earliest programs in areas ranging from dermatology, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, and radiology to the Philadelphia region's only program to perform transplantation of five major organs. In July 2005, U.S. News & World Report named the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to its Honor Roll of the best hospitals in the nation for the ninth straight year.
The Challenge
In 2003, University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) decided to migrate key functionality from a longstanding mainframe system and application to the Eclipsys Suite of Hospital Resource Planning (HRP) products. At the same time, UPHS was attempting to address several additional key problems.
Like many healthcare organizations, UPHS has a very complex environment, comprised of multiple healthcare systems. It combined multiple technologies, including Siemens' SMS, IDX, Sunrise Clinical Manager®, HMM, Cerner®, and MedQuist™. Each solution provides key functionality, but a need existed to access all of their information from a single location.
UPHS relied on a key piece of functionality provided by their outgoing HRP system known as InfoGrams. These short, printer-based documents were used by hospital staff to notify one another, via print, of upcoming events such as patient movement, information requests, and supply requests. With no replacement for this functionality offered by Eclipsys, UPHS turned to ASG-Cypress for help.
UPHS also needed a way to streamline data archiving. Previously, CDs were created offsite at a location in Malvern, PA, and then sent to UPHS in Philadelphia. Not only was this a costly process, but it was completely controlled by an external organization. UPHS wished to bring this process inhouse.
Additionally, like many cost-conscious organizations, UPHS wished to reduce, if not eliminate, production print where possible and replace it with personalized, Web-based delivery and online viewing.
ASG Solution
In order to effectively migrate information throughout all of these systems to the appropriate individuals within the hospital system and meet their other goals, UPHS required a technology that was unbiased and able to accept information from all of these various systems. With the increased demand for consolidated applications, UPHS was hoping to find an integrated solution from a single vendor.
ASG-Cypress was that solution. After a number of meetings with members of the UPHS project team, ASG's Content Management solutions team recommended a single server solution powered by ASG-Cypress to handle all of the needs outlined by the UPHS project team. Not only did it satisfy all of UPHS' critical requirements, but it was the single application from a single vendor - as specified.
ASG-Cypress provides UPHS with the ability to capture output from all of their applications and apply the document content to established business rules to meet the organization's complex distribution, archive, retention, and security requirements.
Measurable Results
ASG-Cypress has become the primary repository for all SMS reports, including standard and ad-hoc formats. ASG-Cypress' indexing and storage functionality has permitted UPHS to significantly reduce printed output by more than half (from over 3 million pages per month to less than 1.5 million pages per month). The goal is to further reduce printed output; perhaps by half again. This reduction has been achieved via ASG-Cypress' ability to automatically distribute reports via UPHS' intranet to the users who need them. ASG-Cypress' robust online viewing capabilities, which include annotation and user collaboration, have been quickly adopted by the users. This has further reduced the need to print pages locally.
By utilizing the Automated Data Mining functionality in ASG-Cypress, UPHS correlates and extracts information from printed reports for aggregation into new reports in multiple formats (in both printed and electronic form). This functionality will ultimately permit UPHS to transmit information externally to business partners (e.g., collection vendors), further streamlining processes.
UPHS also relies on ASG-Cypress to facilitate the input of information into its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system, ChartOne™. ASG-Cypress separates the reports it receives by patient and type of document, exports this information in TIFF format, and encodes the MRN and episode number correctly so that this information and associated documents will appear in the proper place in a patient's medical record. By utilizing ASG-Cypress in this fashion, UPHS was able to save $300,000 during its first year of implementation.
With assistance from ASG-Cypress, UPHS was also able to create a replacement for the legacy InfoGrams system. The new and improved InfoGrams is now Web-based, more user-friendly, and is ultimately expandable. As a patient moves through the system, ASG-Cypress assists in notifying various units within the organization that a patient is on their way, so that the receiving unit is ready to receive them. In addition to patient movement, ASG-Cypress and InfoGrams help to facilitate scheduling changes, supply orders, and other unit-based activities.
Lastly, in an effort to reduce keying (operator-related) errors, UPHS has enhanced many forms with bar codes. UPHS no longer relies on expensive bar code chips or dedicated printers for this functionality, as all bar coding is generated from within the ASG-Cypress application. Not only does ASG-Cypress save costs by eliminating the bar code technology, but it streamlines the creation of these codes by permitting anyone within the organization to add a bar code at any time.
"ASG-Cypress enabled us to save over $1.5 million per year in reduced printing and archival costs, and to streamline our batch printing and distribution processes," stated Tod Simons, UPHS Entity Chief Information Officer.
