Ohta General Hospital Moves to Paperless System Protected by Marathon Software
THE COMPANY
The Fuji Heavy Industry Health Insurance Association Ohta General Hospital in Ohta City, Japan, has rearchitected its physical examination environment to improve patient care and to provide a completely paperless and film-less system. The system is running on fully redundant PRIMERGY TX200FT fault tolerant server hardware running Marathon’s everRun™ software for continuous availability in a Windows 2000 environment.
THE SITUATION
Since opening in 1946, Ohta General Hospital has provided high-quality medical treatment for both association members and the general public. “Although ours is an association hospital, we have also taken on the role of a public hospital for the citizens of Ohta City, since they do not have one. We provide high-quality medical services such as emergency, neurosurgery, and pediatric emergency treatment for our own members as well as neighboring communities such as Tatebayashi City,” said Sadao Nanba, director, Ohta General Hospital.
THE CHALLENGE
In 1996 the hospital opened the Integrated Physical Examination Department, which performs a wide range of physical examinations for all types of cases. With the Ministry of Health and Labor promoting IT in the medical care industry, the hospital has improved medical services by streamlining its ordering system and implementing a program to digitalize X-ray film for its radiology system. To further improve services, the hospital has created a paperless environment through OCR input of case histories and clinical records, and a film-less environment for exams such as endoscopy, electrocardiograms, and fundoscopy.
The hospital wanted to take the next step to a centralized system that would manage digital results from physical exams and would be fully integrated with existing hospital systems.
Junichi Sawabiraki, the head of health promotion and health management in the General Physical Examination Department, said, “We wanted a system that would transmit physical exam data electronically to the appropriate hospital department for diagnosis. This allows diagnosing doctors to access data they need and to compare exam results with past data, enabling them to provide a multifaceted and highly accurate diagnosis.”
Sawabiraki added, “Until now, billing, cancellations or item changes on the day of examination were time consuming, and the patient was made to wait. This system allows changes made by the receptionist to be immediately reflected system wide, eliminating the wait.”
THE SOLUTION
The organization considered proposals from multiple vendors and dealers. In the end, they chose the TAK Integrated Physical Examination System proposed by Fujitsu partner Sorekia Co. Ltd. “Sorekia has worked with our hospital for more than thirty years and they were familiar with our physical examination work and reservation system. They had also implemented the hospital system so they had the know-how and technical skills to integrate the systems,” said Sawabaraki.
“This system was easy to customize and easy to integrate with the hospital system,” said Hiro Satomi, general affairs manager and vice-director of management. “With the Sorekia package, doctors can access physical examination history data on the display as soon as the patient makes an appointment.”
The system was installed on a Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX200FT fault tolerant server with the Windows 2000 operating system. “The Fujitsu servers were redundant and fault tolerant, and because of the reasonable cost and added benefit of high reliability, we decided to install them,” explains Satomi. “If the system were to go down during an examination, then the examination data would be completely unusable and the patient would have to repeat the exam at great inconvenience. Because of that, operational stability of the system was a minimum requirement.”
THE RESULTS
With the new system, the examination process is now paperless and film-less, and all the results are stored as electronic data. Because it is integrated with the hospital system, the diagnosing doctor can see the patient’s exam data and case history immediately. As a result, when patients receive a diagnosis that requires medical treatment, they receive better follow-up care and information about their condition.
In addition, because orders can be changed quickly and supported flexibly, patients do not have to wait while changes are processed. The system reduces paperwork for both doctors and patients.
COST SAVINGS
The system has a cost-saving benefit as well. “X-ray and endoscopy film costs have been eliminated, as has the need for a records storage location. That has a big effect administratively,” said Satomi.
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
“Requests for physical examinations are increasing. We are looking for ways to enrich the physical examination system even more, while maintaining service quality,” said Sawabiraki. For example, in the future each patient may be able to manage examination data on a PC for their own health maintenance. The hospital is also looking for a way to present physical examination data in proprietary formats so that they can support formats from numerous enterprises and share data with other area medical institutions. “With the key elements for this medical institution being space, installation cost and high reliability, we think that fault tolerant servers will be an institution standard. I would like Fujitsu to continue to provide these high reliability products in the future,” said Satomi.
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