Business Situation

El Camino Hospital (ECH) has a strong focus on quality, with the goal to be in the top 5% of hospitals in the United States across all clinical areas by 2012. To achieve this, ECH initiated an extensive quality-focused campaign centered on specific goals and themes. Known as project name, APEX, this endeavor required the collection and analysis of significant amounts of data. The goals of the analysis centered on developing the ability to understand performance, report on it, and drill further down into the data.

ECH had multiple disparate legacy systems that supported numerous departments in the hospital from admitting to finance, and emergency to surgery. Overall there was an ongoing challenge and critical requirement to provide the safest, most efficient, patient-centric and appropriate care especially as computer-based tools and processes are introduced.

Solution

Avanade partnered with ECH to design and build a stable and scalable platform to enable the automation of key business processes and forms. Microsoft SharePoint was chosen as the platform to provide collaboration, workflow, integration and the user interface. This platform was further extended through the use of Microsoft InfoPath to enable electronic forms, and Microsoft SQL Server to store the form data for use in other systems / solutions.

Results

Significant gains in efficiency, data quality and data management have been identified, and are beginning to be realized as forms and processes are automated. Users can enter data directly into an electronic form and submit the form to a workflow process (approval, additional input, alerts, etc).