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Avaya Improves Patient Care and Satisfaction With Communications-Enabled Healthcare Applications(Market Wire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) BASKING RIDGE, NJ -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 05/04/10 -- Avaya today announced it is helping hospitals improve patient care and reduce costs by integrating real-time, intelligent communications into healthcare software applications. These healthcare applications -- powered by Avaya Agile Communications Environment? (ACE) and IBM's Health Integration Framework -- can help hospitals boost safety, efficiency and enable faster, more accurate clinical decisions. Avaya ACE is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) -based application that uses Web services to help healthcare providers integrate communications from nearly any vendor with clinical support applications. The software runs on IBM's Health Integration Framework, which includes WebSphere and DB2, and provides application developers with a suite of tools including application adapters built on health care standards such as HIPAA EDI, HL7 and IHE integration profiles. As a result, clients can more easily integrate patient and clinical data using a single interface. With global IT spending in health care projected to rise more than 6.2 percent in 2010 according to research firm IDC(1), hospitals and healthcare providers like Florida Hospital are seeking solutions to efficiently manage patient care. For Florida Hospital, a 2,200-bed healthcare institution with seven campuses surrounding Orlando, Florida, Avaya has teamed with IBM Global Services to jointly deploy Avaya ACE and the IBM Health Integration Framework to integrate and automate communications for Emergency Equipment Compliance. Joint Commission regulatory requirements mandate that emergency medical equipment such as defibrillators and airway intubators must be tested every 24 hours to ensure it is fully functional at the moment of an urgent patient crisis. Equipment tests must be validated and recorded; non-operational equipment or missing supplies reported, repaired or replaced -- a time-consuming, manual process that is open to error. The new solution will allow a nurse to run the test check and record the status in a laptop. Appropriate departments will automatically be notified when equipment repair or supply replacement is needed. Staff are subsequently notified via text messages or phone calls if test requirements have not been met within a 24-hour period. Finally, the hospital has an auditable record that the tests have been performed. "Florida Hospital is always looking for ways that we can improve patient safety and care by giving our caregivers more time with their patients and reducing time for administrative tasks," said Jayne Bassler, chief clinical informatics officer, Florida Hospital. "By integrating communications with our emergency equipment management system, we expect to improve positive outcomes while becoming more efficient and meeting our regulatory requirements." Communications-enabling the Patient Information Portal Avaya has also integrated communications into the CAREfx Fusionfx Patient Information Aggregation portal using Avaya ACE and the IBM Health Integration Framework to enable real-time clinical alerts. The award-winning solution provides visibility into a healthcare provider's presence from the CAREfx portal. While in the portal, colleagues and support personnel can contact one another using click to call, instant or text messaging, email and/or file sharing. For example, when admitting a patient with chest pain, the care provider can quickly identify the best communication method to use to contact the patient's primary care physician. Using either a quick text message or instant message with the primary care physician's office, the care provider can request a prior EKG and cardiologist note without having to pick up the phone. According to Avaya client research, communications-enabling the CAREfx portal has demonstrated a 75 percent improvement in clinical workflow: reducing time from emergency to recovery to two hours from eight. See the IBM and Avaya CAREfx Flash Demo at: http://www.madeoperativ.com/avaya/demo/index.html Streamlining Patient Discharge ProcessesUsing Avaya Healthcare Workflow Solutions, hospitals can also make patient discharge processes more efficient. By building communications into the patient checkout process, multiple departments can be notified well ahead of a patient's discharge time, including pharmacy, dietary, housekeeping, transport, patient accounts and more. By providing enough advance notice, deliveries from pharmacy or dietary can be halted -- thus decreasing waste; rooms can be turned more quickly, and patients can be on their way home or to other facilities much sooner. With the average U.S. hospital bed representing $500,000 in revenue per year, Avaya patient workflow solutions can provide a net benefit of $1M for an average 300-400 bed hospital.(2) Avaya has a broad range of enterprise communications solutions for healthcare to more than 5,000 healthcare institutions, including health systems, doctors' offices and hospitals. This includes one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the U.S., Group Health Cooperative, which recently selected Avaya contact center capabilities to solve patient issues; Bert Fish Medical Center, a health care complex that improved communications across nine facilities using Avaya solutions; and Intermountain Healthcare, a non-profit healthcare system of 21 hospitals. About Avaya Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, WebSphere, SmartSOA, Smarter Planet and the planet icon are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. For a current list of IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM's future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Reseller prices may vary. (1) Report: IDC Industry Predictions for 2010 (January 2010) (2) Avaya figures based on various independent industry sources Add to Digg Bookmark with del.icio.us Add to Newsvine Deb Kline Avaya 908-953-6179 [email protected] Jonathan Varman Avaya 908 953 6432 [email protected] |