Healthcare Organizations Utilize Enterprise Services to Fast-Track Health IT Purchases

New enterprise services help healthcare providers predict operational and information technology (IT) costs and control ongoing costs while deploying enterprise-wide health IT systems.

Siemens Healthcare (Erlangen, Germany) announced several recent Soarian health IT sales that were strengthened by Siemens ability to deliver a range of cloud computing and managed services. More healthcare organizations are now shifting to electronic health records (EHRs) that provide a platform for an enterprise-wide approach to health IT. In today’s reimbursement environment, it is increasingly important for those organizations to challenge conventional ideas of enterprise IT as a cost center, and Siemens is helping customers create a more sustainable approach to health IT implementations with a range of options from operations to system management to infrastructure and application support.

Helping customers deploy health IT solutions amid an unstable financial climate is a mandate of Agenda 2013, a two-year global initiative of Siemens Healthcare to increase its competitiveness and innovative capacity. “The concept of sustainability has never been more important to healthcare organizations than in today’s environment, where many of our customers do business in highly competitive markets and contend with an oftentimes challenging payor mix,” said David Hamilton, senior vice president, enterprise services, Siemens Healthcare. “Our aim is to assist customers in finding ways to more predictably budget for health IT, while helping them ensure that key operational goals are met in a timely manner.”

Katherine Shaw Bethea (KSB) Hospital (Dixon, IL, USA) is an 80-bed community hospital that signed a 10-year agreement to implement a full range of Soarian Clinicals including Soarian Critical Care and Soarian Emergency Department (ED), along with Siemens medication management solutions, Soarian Device Connect, Soarian electronic document management (EDM), Decision Support Solutions, Soarian Quality Measures, and ePrescribing.

KSB Hospital initially was operating in a best of breed IT environment and had chosen Siemens to provide only the solutions that filled the functional gaps to address the requirements to attest to Meaningful Use (MU) of a certified electronic health record. However, the cost-effective cloud computing option available for the Soarian system helped minimize capital costs and Siemens presented a roadmap to help KSB Hospital administration begin planning an enterprise-wide clinical health IT implementation. Moreover, Siemens was able to help KSB Hospital staff expedite the implementation timeline. KSB Hospital was looking for strong clinical functionality, significant computerized physician order entry (CPOE) adoption, cost-effective price, and ability to adapt the system as their needs change.

“As we evaluated solutions, we began to realize that Siemens had a road map and a commitment to helping move us beyond thinking about best-of-breed solutions and to start thinking about an enterprise clinical IT solution that could be extended all the way out to our ambulatory practice community,” said Tim Broos, vice president and chief information officer, Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital. “In particular, Soarian’s workflow engine hard-wires efficiency across the organization to support quality of care improvement and cost reduction.”

At 342 licensed beds Woman’s Christian Association (WCA) Hospital (Jamestown, NY, USA), recently signed a four-year term extension that also included the addition of the Soarian enterprise health IT suite including Soarian Clinicals and Soarian Financials, as well as EDM, and Siemens medication management solutions. Located in a small, New York town, WCA Hospital also contends with a challenging payor mix. Soarian across the WCA Hospital enterprise will provide a smooth flow of data, while decreasing the need to use bolt-on third-party applications.

“It was readily apparent that we could realize significant efficiency gains from expanding the breadth of our Siemens health IT portfolio across clinical departments,” said Keith Robison, CIO, WCA Hospital. “Soarian will allow us to collect data in new ways and present a more complete view of the patient to our clinicians so information entered about a patient in the ED will be seamlessly presented to all acute care providers.”

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