Client story Steward Health Care Transforms Care Through Digital Innovation
By Insight UK / 20 Jun 2019
Steward Health Care has been at the forefront of using technology to make heatlhcare better. With a network of hospitals and clinics across North America and Europe, Steward Health Care wanted to improve operational efficiency by reducing patient length of stay at its facilities. The organisation needed a modern IT platform to provide pervasive intelligence at scale, so it partnered with Insight’s Digital Innovation team to pilot a new length of stay monitoring system.
The Challenge
Steward Health Care wanted to reduce patient length of stay and improve the overall patient experience.
The organisation found the balance was off between a patient’s length of stay and them receiving clinical care, and administrative inefficiencies meant a significant amount of downtime. For example, the time taken for a lab result to come back and when the doctor would then see the patient, or when the decision was made that the patient could be discharged and then the patient actually was discharged.
They decided to approach Insight to build a pilot application for a length of stay monitoring system that aimed to drive a better quality of care while managing their hospitals more cost effectively.
Insight needed to construct a robust, unified data platform to conform and host data from dozens of production systems. Additionally, an array of highly secure applications was needed to provide visibility and intelligence — from the hospital floor to the C-suite.
The Solution
The Digital Innovation team proposed a combined solution that would take advantage of Microsoft Azure® native Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and encryption to provide HIPAA-compliant security at every level, leveraging cloud-enabled real-time business data and analytics.
Using the length-of-stay monitoring system, Steward Health Care was able to identify and address crucial time gaps in patient care.
Inefficiencies included downtime between lab results and provider consultations and between when patients were cleared to go home and when they were finally discharged.
“The organisation reprioritised its patients. They were able to flag when a patient could go home and have the ability to page providers.”
For example, a provider may visit his or her first patient of the day, order a test and then move on to the next patient. When the results of the test come back, administration can page the provider so they can return to that patient and review the test results in a timely manner.
