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Efficiency Analysis of an Interoperable Healthcare Operations Platform

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
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Abstract

(1) Develop an enterprise platform to unify isolated information, software applications and team members. (2) Assess the efficiency of one benefit of the platform through comparative testing of employee document retrieval times. (3) Evaluate the level of satisfaction among our target audience. We developed an infrastructure to integrate information throughout our practice and make it available on a unified, secure, and remotely accessible platform. We solicited our practice for volunteers to test the new system. All interested volunteers participated. Thirteen employees searched for the same four items in both the new system and our legacy systems. Testing was performed in the pre-deployment stage. In our evaluation, we introduced an innovative method to precisely and objectively obtain data through the use of a widely available tool which could be leveraged for a variety of other studies. On average, it took our participants 7 min and 48 s to find four assigned items in our legacy systems. It only took our volunteers 1 min and 1 s to find the same items with the new platform (p-value 0.002). On a scale of 10 being the highest level of satisfaction, participants ranked the new system to be 8.7 while the traditional system was ranked at 6.3. An overarching enterprise platform is critical due to the ability to unify otherwise isolated applications, people and documents. Because navigating a new system would be expected to take longer than a familiar one, we were surprised by the dramatically improved efficiency and satisfaction of our new interoperable platform compared to the status quo. Since this platform was evaluated in the pre-deployment stage, we expect results to improve with employee experience as well as ongoing enhancements.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Johnny Harbieh, Rosie Hansen, Juleen Kluver, Jeremy Snyder, Kelly Wunderlich, Luanne Kuna, Jodi Kukla, Hans Petterson, Antje Lewald, Deke Weinblatt, Michelle Torkelson, Melinda Sewell, and Karen Scott for their participation in the development of our enterprise platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. vRad (Virtual Radiologic), Eden Prairie, MN, USA

    Thomas F Osborne, Jason Blackowiak, Patrick J Williamson, Shannon M Werb & Benjamin W Strong

  2. MEDNAX Center for Research, Education and Quality, Sunrise, FL, USA

    Thomas F Osborne & Reese H Clark

Authors
  1. Thomas F Osborne
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  2. Reese H Clark
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  3. Jason Blackowiak
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  4. Patrick J Williamson
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  5. Shannon M Werb
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Correspondence to Thomas F Osborne.

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Funding

This study did not receive any grants or funding from agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflicts of interest

All authors declare that there are no conflict of interest associated with this publication.

Ethical approval

Our survey was a quality assessment of a new product to determine time savings. There were no requirements to participate in the survey and no incentives were offered. This was a no risk to the volunteer survey. We did not consider our work to be “human subjects research.”

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health

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Osborne, T.F., Clark, R.H., Blackowiak, J. et al. Efficiency Analysis of an Interoperable Healthcare Operations Platform. J Med Syst 41, 52 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0706-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0706-7

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