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 Salinas Valley Memorial Center Utilizes DR Solution for NICU babies
Salinas Valley Memorial Center is a Public District Hospital located in Salinas, California. Their healthcare system is an integrated network of health care programs, services, and facilities and contains a comprehensive Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to care for the region's most critically ill infants. Business Challenge Salinas Valley Memorial Center participates in the California Perinatal Quality Care Collaborative (CPQCC). This program consists of 60 hospitals sharing perinatal and neonatal outcomes and information to strive for data driven performance improvement and benchmarking throughout California. In particular, clinical and demographic information associated with NICU babies and mothers needed to be collected into a centralized database and made available for transmission to the CPQCC database in an Open manner that would allow the hospital to add its own functionality as required, or allow independent third parties the means to add functionality requested by the hospital. Solution The MEDITECH™ NPR report writer was evaluated for use in gathering and exporting data, but the use of this proprietary system would preclude the desired use of Open software for outcomes analysis and data transmission, and place an additional strain on the hospital's transactional system used for daily patient care. Acmeware proposed that the MEDITECH SQL based Data Repository DR be scanned on a daily basis to load the necessary data into an Acmeware developed NICU Data Entry System that used Microsoft Access, in order to provide the desired Open functionality without impacting performance in the MEDITECH Health Care Information System. Acmeware developed a powerful set of queries to extract the NICU related information from the DR on a daily basis. These queries had the capability of loading all appropriate NICU related clinical and demographic information into the Acmeware NICU Data Entry System. The NICU Data Entry System was designed with a full suite of supplemental data entry routines and reports. A variety of methods for identifying and selecting an infant of interest were provided. Once an infant was identified, forms allowed the nurse to conveniently enter or update virtually any NICU related information, whether captured in MEDITECH or entered directly in the NICU Data Entry System. The user interface was designed in a user friendly manner using drop down boxes, radio buttons, and default values wherever possible. Validation was performed immediately upon data entry to provide instant feedback and prevent invalid values from being submitted to the database. A suite of 20 standard reports was also developed. Examples include a maternal demographic information mailing label report, and a clinical information for babies ventilated more than 4 hours report. Functionality was also provided to allow export of report data to Microsoft® Excel for further analysis. Documentation and training was provided to allow the hospital's Information System's staff to enhance functionality by adding further reports of interest to the Open Microsoft Access system. A routine was also developed to allow a CPQCC export report to be run by the NICU nursing staff on a quarterly basis. This report gathers all NICU related information entered during the previous three months, and automatically encrypts and uploads this information through the Internet to the CPQCC system database. The information is integrated with more than 60 other hospitals participating in the CPQCC program to provide consolidated comparison reporting and trending analysis. Conclusion The MEDITECH SQL Server based DR combined with Acmeware's custom developed NICU Data Entry System using Microsoft Access provided a user friendly solution to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital's NICU data management problem. This approach consolidated NICU clinical and demographic information, allowed for data editing and reporting, and provided a one-click data transmission solution to send encrypted data to the main CPQCC system. The client also benefited from the System's open design, report development extendibility, and its easy maintainability to remain compliant with the CPQCC system's yearly schema changes. The hospital has also benefited from the efficiency of paperless transactions at every step and the elimination of laborious tasks such as abstracting, mailing, logging, filing, and reentry of NICU related data. |
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