VitalCenter – Your Business Continuity Solution
Galen Healthcare Solutions proudly announces VitalCenter: Your Business Continuity Solution. VitalCenter provides access to patient chart information, even while the EHR is unavailable.
The Problem
We have all struggled through downtime of the EHR. It happens for a variety of reasons – network downtime at one clinic, a database slowdown that brings the enterprise to a halt, planned upgrades, and so on. Regardless of the reason, we sit there struggling to manage the situation.
You might be a physician, nurse or other care provider whose ability to treat patients is hindered without the patient’s chart. You do your best to make your way through the next few minutes, the rest of the visit, the next hour while patient charts are not available. Your IT group may not be able to tell you when the EHR will become available again.
You might be in IT, furiously troubleshooting the source of the downtime. You know how it goes – a few calls have come into the helpdesk indicating that the EHR is unavailable. Is it affecting all sites? If not, which ones? Is the EHR completely unavailable? Is it hanging? Just very slow? Check the network. Check the web servers. Check the load balancer. Check the database. Anything conclusive? You may be lucky enough to quickly know the cause. Is there a solution? Is it a stop-gap, or a complete solution. What do we need to communicate to the end-users? How do we avoid this in the future?
As a practice administrator, you’re doing your best to make sure that patients can be seen while the EHR is not available, and making sure patients who cannot be seen are rescheduled. Are the patients being treated as well as if their charts were accessible? Do we send patients home and reschedule, or do we do our best while they are here?
The administration feels the weight of perception bearing down on them. How do our physicians feel about our ability to provide reliable tools to perform their jobs? How will our patients and the community responding to their charts not being available when they are being seen? How will the EHR being unavailable at times affect our bottom line? Are we able to safely treat patients at all times?
The Solution
VitalCenter provides a solution for those scenarios, as well as any other where the EHR is not available to a user – all they need is access to a PC with VitalCenter.
Each PC configured with VitalCenter is updated regularly with the latest charts for a given location. Typically, this means all of the patients for a given set of providers who are being seen in the coming week, and any patients seen within the last few weeks – to cover any follow-up calls, like questions about lab results. The information shown in each VitalCenter chart may be configured at the enterprise level, and all the way down to specific providers. Patient’s chart information is pulled from the EHR on a regular schedule – nightly, or even regularly throughout the day, without any impact on the EHR’s responsiveness.
VitalCenter also provides the ability to print a specific patient’s chart. Even if the patient doesn’t have a scheduled appointment you can access their chart through the management site and save a copy of their chart as a PDF document.
Learn More
Please join us at http://vitalcenter.galenhealthcare.com to learn more.
