Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation uses Caché for centralized, Web-based emergency referral
Key Benefits
- Web Technology
- Instantaneous Access
- Scalability
When the RFP came across her desk, Shelley Moneta's heart must have skipped a beat. Ontario's Ministry of Health had decided to centralize all of the existing emergency referral programs throughout the province. Wanting to reduce costs and increase the quality of care, the Ministry had put out a call for a system that would make more efficient use of resources. The Ministry envisioned a system that would help doctors everywhere in the province access comprehensive information about the availability of health care resources anywhere in Ontario.
As the operations manager of the CritiCall Referral Program at Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation, Moneta knew her organization was positioned to win the contract. The 1,500-bed Hamilton Health Sciences Corporation is the largest provider of comprehensive health care in Ontario. Its CritiCall program already was providing a centralized referral service to smaller, regional hospitals in Hamilton. The cornerstone of that program was the Hamilton Central Bed Registry. The Registry enjoyed wide approval from health care professionals, thanks in large part to the efforts of Dr. Frank Baillie, a general surgeon and CritiCall's medical director. But the system was fifteen years old, using out-of-date and low performing equipment like dial-up modems. Moneta surmised that a new application could be built using Baillie's model, but basing the application on new technology.
Hamilton turned to InterSystems VAR, Rincon Technologies, Inc. Using Caché, InterSystems' new post-relational database, Rincon created in three months a system that fulfilled the Ministry's RFP and won the contract for Hamilton. Now, anyone with an Internet browser and a password can access the status of resources at any of the seven major health care centers in Ontario. Smaller, regional hospitals are now being added to the system. The plan is to have the resources at every hospital in Ontario listed on the system by the end of 1998.
"We never worried about the scalability issue. With Caché we knew that we wouldn't have to worry about how large the application grew."
- Joseph Scaglione
Principal Rincon's
"CritiCall gives immediate access to information that health care providers need," explained Moneta. "A physician can now log in and get up-to-date status on the emergency room, intensive care, labor and delivery, available beds, and name and contact information for the on-call physician in all of the 45 major medical specialties." CritiCall also offers hospital administrators a solid management tool from which reports can be run against the information in the database.
The system runs on a Microsoft NT cluster for redundancy, and is composed of 200 MHz four- processor Intel Pentiums. Caché connects the 3.5 GB database to Pentium clients running Netscape or Microsoft Internet browsers.
Flexibility and scalability are two attributes of Caché that Rincon found appealing. "Hamilton wanted to take advantage of the cost-saving characteristics of an Internet-based application," explained Paul Errygers, one of Rincon's principals. "We first wrote an interface with CGI script, and when InterSystems announcedits web technology, we easily ported the application over."
Initially the system was slated just for Ontario's seven major health care centers. When the Ministry of Health saw how well the system worked, it decided to include all of the smaller, regional hospitals in the province - 170 in total. "We never worried about the scalability issue," said Joseph Scaglione, Rincon's second principal. "With Caché we knew that we wouldn't have to worry about how large the application grew."
Rincon also chose Caché for performance because, when a call comes in, the information has to be at the user's fingertips. "We have immediate access to information, so there's no 'hurry up and wait,'" says Moneta.
"Our experience is in relational technology including Oracle and DB2, and no other database technology that we know of compares to Caché," states Scaglione.
"We are delighted with Caché on NT," adds Errygers. "We have leading edge technology, not bleeding edge," maintains Moneta. "We have the best technology supporting CritiCall, and we are very comfortable with that."