Enterprise Logistics for Health Care
Every day thousands of decisions are made in hospitals and clinics. In some environments tens of thousands of data items are generated, and need to be followed up and acted upon; whether they be referrals, medications, lab orders, and so on. Furthermore, in health care some data is time critical, and a patient’s state may be rapidly changing.
In health care today clinical staff are expected to keep track of what is new, what is important, and what is changing rapidly, and act upon this information across many patients, and many thousands of data items. In essence, keeping health care running efficiently and safely is almost impossible without assistance. Is it any wonder that preventable error rates in hospital are high: for example studies have shown that up to 40% of patients don’t get on the right discharge medications that are vital for improving their survival, up to 40% of blood test ordered in hospitals are never seen, preventable deaths in hospital still run at over 10,000 per year.
Health care is perhaps the last industry that still requires its staff to make heroic efforts just to do their job effectively, with little systemic logistic support.
Alcidion believes that the only way health care will scale to meet the increasing demands placed upon it if the IT infrastructure plays an active role in supporting clinical practice. This is the premise upon which the Miya Platform has been built.
The Miya Platform actively monitors all data events for emerging risks and forgotten tasks. Risks may be individual patient risks or organisational risks. When risks reach a certain threshold (e.g. probability or expected loss) the Miya Platform can implement escalation and mitigation strategies to minimize harm to patients and to the organisation.
There are several ways in which Active Monitoring is carried out:
- Each data item sent to Miya can trigger decision support logic to look at the data and evaluate it for risk
- Miya can trigger decision support based on timers that fire at regular intervals to gather data and trend changes
- Decision support logic can schedule events in the future so Miya can check if a situation has resolved or if important tasks have been completed
So, use Miya across the organisation to automate, alert, escalate, and monitor so clinical staff know that there is a safety net that will pick up risks as they occur rather than leaving it to heroics and luck. Examples for active monitoring include:
- Implement strategies for alerting pharmacists if someone on a high risk drug has reducing renal function
- Automate messages to clinical units if their patients re-enter the hospital within 24 hours of a discharge
- Monitor hourly or daily discharge rates, admission rates and number of outlier to see which units are starting to become blocked
- Automate notifications to GPs and other members of the care team on patient admission or discharge, or both
Miya is enterprise ready. The Miya Platform is built on grid-technology so it can scale to meet new demands and support complex analytics.
The Miya Platform for Active Monitoring
Alerts & Decision Support
The Miya Decision Support Engine (DSE) monitors all data flowing through the system and can trigger alerts and notifications. We call this active monitoring. Miya plays an active role in supporting clinical staff. The Miya DSE can be configured to monitor and alert for clinical and organisational risks.
Notifications
Messages to allied health, referrals and any other member of the care or hospital team are sent via Miya and tracked for follow up. Reminders can be escalated to ensure patient flow is not compromised. Workflow steps can be configured for each type of notification, e.g. radiology order status, transport, cleaning.
Performance Monitoring
Miya captures KPI performance and risk data in real-time. Measures include occupancy, length of stay, clinical activity and costs. You can add additional metrics as. Managers and clinical heads can get a real-time view of the organisation and respond to changes as they occur, rather than months after the event. As with all parts of the Miya Platform, alerts can be attached to any data or thresholds.
Gateway Services
Miya can prepare messages for delivery to GPs and community providers. The Miya Gateway gathers relevant data, formats information for the specific recipient and delivers messages to numerous GP messaging systems, or directly through encrypted email or SMS. Miya Gateway also supports capturing referrals from the community to hospitals or care centres. Referrals can include Smart Forms for risk scoring or eligibility assessment.
Patient Outcomes
Miya Patient Outcomes monitors outcome indicators, observations, lab results and assessment scores and displays them so clinic staff can quickly see how a patient is progressing. Units can set thresholds for alerts or notifications to parts of the clinical team to monitor key outcomes and automate workflows. For example, if a patient on a high risk medication that develops signs of renal impairment then this is displayed on the Clinical Dashboard, and can generate notification to the unit pharmacist to review medications.
Portal
Get risk rated information, notifications, tasks and results from web browsers and mobile devices inside and outside the hospital. Miya Portal uses the latest web technologies to create a highly visual and responsive experience for modern web browsers and mobile devices. (Coming soon)
