UMass Memorial Medical Center goes live on Hospice system

CAMBRIDGE, US: InterSystems Corporation, announced that the UMass Memorial Medical Center has rolled out the NDoc home care & hospice system from its application partner, Thornberry Ltd. NDoc is built on the InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration and development platform.

More than 130 end-users, including clinicians in the field and office-based staff, are using the application, which went live in April. Information entered by clinicians during each patient visit is stored in an InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance database that resides on a laptop PC. This information flows via Ensemble to the data server in the home office. Automated data synchronization is handled through a bidirectional interface and can be performed any time at the convenience of the clinician.

Just weeks after the NDoc rollout, Mary Stone, Director of Operations for UMass Memorial Home Health and Hospice, is reporting significant benefits. “Almost immediately, we began to see the elimination of redundant data capture,” she said. Formerly, the workflow process required paper documentation of visit activity which was developed by the clinicians during the patient visits and then keyed in by other personnel. The process involved extensive supervisory time and expense to identify and correct information inconsistencies. “NDoc provides real-time validation as information is entered on the laptops at the point of care while also automating the entire entry process,” Stone explained. “Once the staff has some experience with the system, we expect productivity to increase significantly while overtime utilization is measurably reduced.”

The clinicians are reacting very positively as they transition to Ensemble-based NDoc, according to Stone. “The software is very intuitive … it provides logic that guides clinicians as they create the patient’s care plan.”

In addition, Stone is pleased with the response and performance of the Ensemble-based application. “We relied on our IT department to help us make the right software choice,” she said. The product architecture, which includes NDoc running with CACHÉ on the laptop, information transfer via Ensemble to the back office database, and a shadow server for recovery in a disaster scenario, received a positive vote from the organization’s technologists. “We never want to have to revert to paper again.”