When a software application on a clinician’s tablet takes a full minute to come up, it’s time to do something about it.
That was the situation at Providence Health & Services Washington Region when CIO Curt Kwak took the opportunity to test technology aimed at improving the performance and availability of clinical applications.
As Kwak tells it, he and everyone else were frustrated with the slowness of the system and were losing confidence in the data.
Providence launched a pilot last summer using Compuware Vantage – performance-monitoring technology that enabled Kwak and his IT team to observe the service quality delivered to the clinicians. This month or next, Providence will extend the Vantage rollout to three major hospitals, encompassing 750 patient beds.
With real-time visibility into clinician experience, the team will more easily resolve performance issues before they affect patients, Kwak said, and it will make it easier for the clinical staff to adopt and use the applications.
The pilot showed immediate productivity gains, Kwak said. Instead of the one minute to pull up data, it took 15 seconds.
Moreover, the IT team gained a view across disparate systems – McKesson, GE and Cerner, to name three.
“The clinical process crosses these systems,” said Michael Wilson, Compuware’s senior IT director for clinical systems. “It’s important to have visibility across these systems. Compuware provides a whole new look to how the systems are working together, and it’s helped shape the behavior of clinical staff as to how they’re using the system.”
Kwak’s 160-member IT team is bullish on the new view. The team’s confidence level has improved.
“They understand what the issues are,” Kwak said.
Providence Health & Services Washington Region is part of a 27-hospital healthcare system. It is one of the nation’s largest non-profit integrated healthcare systems with more than $4 billion in assets.
With more than 10,000 employees in Western Washington, approximately 7,500 clinical staff (physicians, nurses and ancillary technicians) use the clinical applications. To provide patients with the highest quality of care, the clinical staff needs those systems to work flawlessly 24/7, outage-free.
“We have this audacious goal in healthcare to make the systems run consistently like a utility,” Wilson said. Compuware helps achieve this in other markets, such as finance and “This end-to-end visibility will enable us to be more proactive and definitive in the way we support our application users and in turn, will allow the clinical staff to provide exceptional patient care, which is part of the regional transformational vision,” Kwak said.
“Compuware shows particular stretch in its technology’s ability to convert data obtained from a broad range of protocols into intuitive and business-meaningful visualizations of end-user experience,” said Gartner analyst Will Cappelli in a Feb. 18, research note on application performance monitoring in which he also assessed competitors, including HP, CA, IBM and Oracle.
“Poor performance and unexpected downtime diminishes overall hospital productivity and jeopardizes patient care,” said Larry Angeli, vice president, Compuware Healthcare Solutions. “Healthcare organizations like Providence Health & Services can cut the risk of these scenarios significantly by maintaining optimal performance and availability.”
