The Cornerstones of Digitization
The goal at the Saint-Joseph Hospital in Paris is to go completely digital. In order to reach this ambitious objective, hospital officials led by Christophe Nicolaï, head of IT at Saint-Joseph, have decided to use the JiveX Healthcare Content Management (HCM) system to consolidate and standardize medical data.
JiveX Healthcare Content Management at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris
“We’ve already made a fair bit of progress on the path to digitization,” Nicolaï explains. “The HCM will now help us prepare for the future in terms of interoperability and will strengthen the digital flow of data within our institution by consolidating and standardizing medical data.” All medical data, regardless of the original source and format, will be channeled into JiveX, where they will be converted into a standard format. Deep integration with KIS will then make these data available throughout the hospital. This will ensure that staff will be able to see patient- and/or case-related information—even information from the medical archive—anytime throughout the entire treatment phase at the hospital.
More Digital Consistency
“Saint-Joseph is largely a paperless hospital—our treatment records and medical files are exclusively digital. But when it came to digitizing files, we initially reached the limit of paperless record-keeping. But we wanted to keep moving forward. So we began thinking about the problem of integrating medical equipment, especially in terms of connectivity and interoperability between mobile devices with autonomous data storage and administration systems. If we were going to make sure our digitization policies are uniform, we had to integrate those devices too,” Nicolaï went on to say. The Cardiology Department led the way on integration: “At the beginning of the project, our primary aims were to digitize cardiac function testing, make these data available in the patient context, and send them to the hospital’s electronic patient file.”
"We’ve already made a fair bit of progress on the path to digitalization. The HCM will now help us prepare for the future in terms of interoperability and will strengthen the digital flow of data within our institution by consolidating and standardizing medical data."
Christophe Nicolaï
Head of IT at Saint-Joseph
Just transferring the data was not enough, however, as Nicolaï then explains: “Implementing JiveX HCM offers us the opportunity of consolidating patient IDs and migrating them to a uniform work-list system. Another reason for doing that was to ensure data integrity—from generation to viewing—so that we could keep our data fully under control at all times.” The HCM allows physicians at Saint-Joseph to view medical data stemming from any modality on a single screen. That saves time because it obviates the need for consulting different systems in order to obtain a full overview. In addition, the HCM also ensures that users do not overlook information relevant to treatment. Introducing the HCM offered physicians a solution that accounts for all of the different results and modalities. “Consolidation greatly simplifies doctors’ work processes,” adds Sonia Fevrier, a project manager at Saint-Joseph Hospital.
Increasing Efficiency by Homogenizing Data
What other benefits does a hospital like Saint-Joseph receive beyond data integration and standardization? Christophe Nicolaï summarizes it like this: homogeneity equals efficiency. After all, the data in a health facility all come from heterogeneous sources. A considerable number of autonomous solutions have coalesced around patients’ electronic files, and those data are not always available in the patient context. “Here at Saint-Joseph Hospital, for example, we realized we were working with six or seven different software packages in ophthalmology, and the information that they generated wasn’t automatically uploaded into patients’ electronic files,” says Nicolaï, describing the processes before the HCM was introduced. Homogenizing data with JiveX closes those information gaps, with all medical data now available to doctors when and where they need it. Standardizing formats and communication languages means that data generated by medical equipment can all be integrated into the information life cycle. The logic that used to govern information procurement has been turned on its head: the strategy is no longer to look for data where they are generated—at times a painstaking process—but to access them instead by importing them as needed.
A Better Understanding of the Hospital’s Problems
“JiveX has accomplished even more than that in our facility: it’s had an impact on how we view collaboration. We worked with the medical technology team, for example, to overhaul service specifications and ensure the connectivity of each new device before we even purchase it. We started with biomedicine, but the prospects for integration go beyond that, of course. We really do want to connect every device that can be connected,” Nicolaï adds.
Thanks to the conversion tools that JiveX offers, that kind of integration does not necessarily mean having to purchase new equipment. JiveX can even work with systems that generate proprietary data and integrate them into the patient context. That saves money. “This integration work has allowed us to complete the second step in the overall digitization project here at the Saint-Joseph Hospital. Homogenizing formats and data is a long-term, sustainable solution for conveniently migrating existing software and integrating new systems into the data system. In terms of integration and general availability, the logic of the HCM resolves a key challenge for optimizing and increasing efficiency, and that, in turn, has a significant impact on the treatment process for our patients,” says Nicolaï in conclusion.
