Glasgow Primary Care Division
Background
Community Health Care is a significant and growing area of medical care. Clinical staff manage large patient case loads, and require secure, up-to-date access to data on many patients. Staff require to be able to record patient information while mobile rather than building up large amounts of administrative work when they return to the office. Glasgow Primary Care Division (GPCD) has worked with Kelvin Connect to create a mobile information system for use by Community Nurses that can download data from and update information in their existing patient data repository.
Key Issues
- Nurses cannot afford to carry around bulky equipment such as laptops or Tablet PCs, because of poor battery life, slow start-up times and the risk of the devices being stolen.
- GPCD had an existing back-end information system from Orion Systems International with which the mobile devices had to be able to communicate. This system consisted of the Concerto Portal, the Rhapsody Integration Engine and SWE (Soprano Workflow Engine).
- Requirements for the system continued to change and GPCD wanted a system that would be easy to upgrade and maintain
- Clinical staff needed to access and capture patient information in a range of locations and could not rely permanently on network connections for on-line access.
- While a hand-held solution for data capture was essential, most nurses had no previous experience with such devices
- At times the nurses were extremely busy, so data entry had to be intuitive and very fast.
- Patient-identifying data was captured, so security and encryption were significant issues.
The Solution
- We provided GPCD with KCBuilder, our rapid development toolset, KCEngine (our mobile runtime engine) and KCHub (our server software).
- The solution allowed GPCD to develop their own PDA forms.
- After initial installation, software updates could be deployed remotely and automatically via KCHub. These changes can include bug fixes, changes to existing forms and the addition of whole new forms.
- We provided consultancy to integrate our software with the existing Orion systems. Use of XML for all information exchange made this integration easier.
- The solution provided a generic integration mechanism, linking data between any KCBuilder created form and its equivalent Orion SWE form.
- PDAs authenticate (via KCHub) against Concerto (Orion's portal) allowing IT staff to manage users via one central location.
- PDAs initially download a full caseload for a particular clinician from SWE (on average around 200 patients). Further updates are very fast as only changed data is transferred.
- Initially communication uses simple docking, but the solution is designed for upgrade to wireless operation whenever desired.
- Date storage and communication is protected by strong encryption.
The Results
- The solution has been piloted with 50 nurses.
- Nurses have responded very positively to the new system and are keen to continue using it.
- The existing system is to be expanded by integrating an Ultragenda scheduling system.
- A roll out to several hundred nurses was planned.