Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital (VGHKS), a public medical center in South Taiwan, is now able to manage and make secure patient data and improve the efficiency of hospital processes from a single point of control, thanks to a workload automation solution from Business Service Management (BSM).
According to a company press release, using the BSM solution, BMC Control-M Workload Automation, VGHKS has seen a 50 percent improvement in operational and manpower efficiencies.
Carol Cain and Saira Haque note that the introduction of health IT can disrupt existing workflows in an organization, in a white paper written for the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Not surprisingly, organizations that consider and, like VGHKS, then automate their workflow design are far more likely to succeed at adapting to health IT, and the healthcare challenges ushered in by the new electronic world.
VGHKS, like many hospitals around the world, has seen technology move into the forefront of hospital administration and operations because of the security and system integrity it can provide. VGHKS’s IT team found it had to manage immense amounts of data and complex workflow processes needing access to statistics about the hospital, patients, daily revenues from all departments, changes in surgery priorities and duty shifts for more than 580 doctors and over 1,700 nurses and staff, and even specific details on particular diseases.
The press release reported that BMC’s workflow automation solution needed to include thousands of complex scheduled jobs every day as well as management of huge amounts of data connected by complex relationships in the ecosystem of medical services environments.
"After a rigorous evaluation process, we selected BMC Control-M as our new enterprise-level scheduling solution," said Shou Cheng Xiong, leader of Information Department at VGHKS. “By integrating and automating business processes and managing them from a single point of control, the platform provides a dynamic workload management solution that works across different systems and applications for the entire hospital now.”
VGHKS’s IT management system was not up to the job, unable to be integrated with the mainframe host, according to the press release, because data was stored in one place and applications run in another, preventing the hospital’s IT systems to “talk” to each other. VGHKS went to BMC for a new system to minimize risk, eliminate delays between jobs, and be able to be integrated with the hospital’s existing IT infrastructure.
“In the medical industry, a huge amount of patient data and diagnostic statistics are transmitted every single day. This information is needed by processes that must be carried out at any time, making a robust and easy-to-manage IT infrastructure extraordinarily important,” said John Cheng, regional director of Mainframe Service Management, BMC Greater China. “BMC Control-M secures and executes data across mainframe and distributed environments, automates job scheduling and ensures security and stability while lowering cost. For VGHKS the benefits are clear: greater efficiency and productivity, reduced risk and a better quality experience for staff and patients alike.”
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli