Qliance Documents Management System

The Challenge

The Solution

Norima worked with clinicians and other members of medical staff to identify all business and technical requirements for documents processing. We examined essential functions of the legacy systems and patterns of use, and came up with a design for DM application that is intuitive, easy to use, and well-integrated with the EHR/PM system. All inbound and outbound documents are automatically stored in a designated and secure repository and are instantly available for viewing and processing.

The Documents Manager can be used in two modes: as a standalone application used by the documents processing team, and as an integrated module of EHR/PM system. Clinicians and medical staff can see either all documents for a given patient (Patient View) or all documents related to a given user (User View).

Watershed Health Readmission Monitoring

The Challenge

Policy makers are constantly searching for ways to improve the quality of patient care and lower Medicare program spending. One indicator of inadequate quality that results in increased Medicare spending is the rate of readmissions to a hospital. According to CMS, historically about one in five Medicare patients discharged from a hospital are readmitted within 30 days. In 2012, the Affordable Care Act enacts a penalty for excess readmissions. CMS estimates 2,225 hospitals will be penalized $227 million because of excess readmissions in this fiscal year (starting Oct 1, 2013).

The Solution

Watershed Health and Norima developed a comprehensive readmission risk monitoring and management system to help hospitals identify those patients with a high risk of readmission and to then proactively monitor those patients after discharge to prevent any unnecessary readmissions. Watershed’s ambitious mission went further than the 30 days stipulated by CMS and empowers patients with information about their own condition and readmission risks so they can make better decisions about their health. Watershed engaged Norima to strategically assess the technology options for their solutions and, based on the findings, to develop an innovative platform that enables better patient care while reducing costs associated with readmission.

1. Provide better identification of potential readmission risks during hospitalization and after discharge via remote monitoring.
2. Enable patients to be monitored post-hospital discharge via wireless monitoring devices such as weight scales and blood-pressure cuffs to alert of changes in health that warrant care intervention.
3. Allow hospital administrators to set care guidelines and standards of care for admissions in consistent and automated fashion that allocates resources in a pre-determined format that increases the quality of care without increasing costs.
4. Use HL7 messaging standards to automate data exchange between EHR and Watershed.

Qinec Radiology Information System

The Challenge

Founded in 2005, UK-based Qinec offers a web-based, integrated EHR and practice management solution called QinecEnterprise for many types of outpatient care clinics of any size. Qinec offers solutions for primary care doctors, ophthalmologists, dentists, physio-therapists and fertility doctors. Qinec is the only software vendor in UK who delivers all five key components of outpatient care management on a single, integrated technology platform – scheduling, case management, medical records, billing, and reporting. One of the market opportunities identified by Qinec was a market of imaging diagnostic clinics. The key challenge was to integrate EMMA with the medical imaging solution PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). Qinec engaged Norima to deliver a workflow management solution that could combine key, proprietary radiology modules with QinecEnterprise into one, integrated Radiology Information System (RIS) for diagnostic centers.

The Solution

During Phase 1 of development, Norima partnered with Qinec and radiologists to identify workflows and system’s requirements for an integrated solution that ensures the patient’s management functions, patient’s electronic health records and diagnostic images are available across both systems. Based on gathered information, Norima is currently developing a RIS solution that will allow integration with any PACS and will provide a simple way for imaging diagnostic centers to build automated diagnostic workflows based on their specific needs. Also, users will have the ability to access patient data, reports and images via QinecEnterprise, removing the need to log into the PACS separately. The goal is to make QinecEnterprise a fully integrated RIS-PACS software solution that includes a full range of modules for radiology departments and medical imaging facilities of all sizes.