Honorable Mention
David Stoltz, Information
Management Programming
Manager
Sacred Heart Hospital,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
dstoltz@shh.org
Sacred Heart Gets a Pacemaker
For several years, Sacred Heart Hospital in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, had been having
trouble with “bed flow,” the process of
admitting patients, transferring them within
the hospital, and eventually discharging
them. The process used was intensely manual,
involving many phone calls between nursing
staff and administrators looking for available rooms and beds. Bottlenecks in the
process plagued the system further; if you
couldn’t find the person who could answer
your question, you were stuck. To solve the
problem, the hospital asked David Stoltz to
design a solution that the entire staff could
access easily.
David explains, “We wanted to design a
visual solution—a ‘bed board’—that people
could access through a Web-based application. Although all the patient information
we needed was already in our IBM AS/400,
querying that system was far too slow.”
To speed queries, David’s team used SQL
Server 2000 along with Microsoft Internet
Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Web server
and ASP technology to design an intermediary database for processing the necessary
data. David created a DTS package, stored
procedures, and tables to store the patient,
room, and bed information in a SQL Server
database. The DTS package connects to the
AS/400, creates a transaction, then queries
all the needed bed data and stores it in the
database. This process runs once a minute, so the Web application is always current.
The SQL Server database ended up at just 3.63MB. The front-end Web page queries
SQL Server instead of the AS/400, processing more than 60 stored procedures and
code in less than one second—a dramatic
improvement over direct queries to the
AS/400, each of which took 45–50 seconds.
This improvement means the new Web-based, visual front end gives hospital staff a
bird’s-eye view of the entire hospital’s bed
status, so nursing units can communicate
with the admissions department—and vice
versa—through the application.
The solution has been a great improvement for the hospital, says David. “Beds are
cleaned faster, admissions can admit patients
faster, it has improved unit communication
and process flow, and there’s better accountability among the staff.” You can see a sample
screen from the application at http://www.shh.org/images/bbs_ss.jpg.
End of Article
Prev. page
1
2
3
4
[5]
next page -->
