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Al-Salam Hospitals Co.

Analyses OPD business using Sharper Software's Business Intelligence Services. Furthermore, Lowers Data Management Costs, improves services and availability, and gets insights by migrating from Oracle Database to SQL Server.

Industry

Healthcare

Country of Origin

Kuwait

In Business Since

51-

Employees

+

Outpatient Clinics

Al-Salam Hospitals Co.

Background

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. was originally established in 1964, as a small ten-bedded Maternity Hospital, staffed by one OBS/GYN Doctor and five nurses. Since then, the hospital kept growing both in size and number of staff, building on its reputation as a leading private hospital in Kuwait. In May 1992, the hospital widened its scope of services and became a full-fledged secondary care General Hospital. In January 2001, an ambitious expansion program lead to the commencement of the construction of the new facility, which was commissioned on April 16th, 2006.

Business Needs & Challenges - Civil ID Integration

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. is the leading private healthcare hospital in Kuwait that is setting the standards in patient care and state-of-the art medical services. Maintaining patient information is an error-prone, time-consuming effort. Information Workers at the hospital who track patient data are:

  1. Patient-Facing Receptionists.
  2. Call Center representatives who talk to patients over remote channels (e.g. Phone).
  3. Medical Records Officers who maintain patient files.
  4. Insurance Officers who maintain patient’s relationship with Insurance Companies.
  5. Doctors and Physicians providing diagnosis.
  6. Nurses and Technicians assisting the doctors.
  7. Marketing personnel helping the hospital expand to new markets.
  8. Pharmacy staff who deliver medication to patients.
  9. Information Technology specialists supporting the infrastructure.

Each of the above information workers needs to know as much detailed and accurate information about the patient as possible. For example, Medical Records need to keep the medical records of the patients as much up-to-date as possible. Receptionists need to make sure all patients are reachable. Insurance Officers need to reduce fraud and improve insurance claim accuracy. Call Center Representatives need to ensure the best service levels. Doctors, Nurses and Technicians need to keep the patient records up-to-date.

In order for Al-Salam’s business to run efficiently, the time it takes to update the patient records should be as short and as accurate as possible. This information should be provided to the rest of the information workers as accurately as possible. Time means money and money means the hospital can survive under the tough competitive business environment.

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. aims to expand its business and reach. In order to achieve this, the hospital needs to maximize its top-line revenue, while minimizing its bottom-line costs, but not at the expense of quality of services delivered to patients. Maintaining accurate patient data will help improve the efficiency of its direct marketing activities.

Characteristics of a viable solution

A viable solution should use the Smart Civil ID to capture patient data and automatically store it into the existing DMS system at the Hospital. Users should have little-to-no interaction with the process. All users have to do is insert the Smart Civil ID into a reader and click a button on the screen. Patient details should be captured automatically and accurately.

Solution

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. deployed SharperIntegration® for reading Civil Information off the Smart Civil ID and saving the records into the existing Healthcare Management Information System (HMIS) at the hospital. Despite the fact that SharperIntegration works on the Microsoft platform while the HMIS is running on the Oracle platform, SharperIntegration’s extensible model allowed it to connect seamlessly with the HMIS. The hospital started to reap the benefits of the solution early on with the help of the Sharper Software team.


Business Needs & Challenges - Business Intelligence

The Hospital has several Outpatient Departments, each of which runs its own operations and is managed by its own resources. This independence comes at a price, though, as the Hospital does not have adequate insight into the OPD operations. OPD operations themselves have a hard time keeping track of the growing number of patients and their treatments. It is imperative to have a Business Intelligence platform that provides such insights into the health of the business.

Characteristics of a viable solution

The proposed solution should provide ways to connect to a diverse set of data sources, allow ways to provide a business-friendly model to analyze data, use attractive and intuitive data visualizations and provide the required insight into the OPD business to concerned personnel.

Solution

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. teamed up with Sharper Software to provide their Business Intelligence Services. Sharper Software helped the Hospital build interactive dashboards that show the health of the OPD operations. Underlying these dashboards is an engine that imports critical data from multiple sources, transforms this data to meet business needs, builds a business-friendly data model that allows end users to analyze data and attractive data visualizations that provide an intuitive user experience.

The result is that Al-Salam Hospitals Co. has dashboards that show the health of OPD operations.


Business Needs & Challenges - Oracle to SQL Server Migration

Al-Salam Hospitals Co. has several databases based on Oracle. Most of these databases were managed in-house by the Hospital's own resources. However, Oracle increased costs by a significant figure in the past few years, placing further burden on the shoulders of the IT Budget. The Hospital needed to consider alternatives that were cost-effective, while keeping the service levels as high as the existing platform, if not better.

Characteristics of a viable solution

Select Oracle databases need to be migrated to a more cost-effective database platform, while keeping the database highly available. If the new platform provides additional services, that would be a welcome bonus. It is, naturally, important that the migrated data is kept intact during the migration.

Solution

Al=Salam International Hospital selected Oracle to SQL Server Migration Services and migrated select databases off Oracle to SQL Server. Data was not only kept intact during the migration, but data entry errors, as well as data quality issues, were highlighted during the migration. This helped the Hospital understand the value of Data Quality. The new data platform helped the Hospital save a lot of money, while providing additional services using SQL Server Integration, Analysis and Reporting Services. The Hospital is now considering utilizing other SQL Server Services (e.g. Master Data Services, Data Quality Services, etc.) to further enhance its data services and deliver higher value to the rest of the business.

Benefits

Shorter Wait Times

Your customers, patients and/or employees will spend less time waiting for you to process their data.

Data Accuracy

Information is guaranteed to be correct and authoritative, as it's provided by the Public Authority for Civil Information.

Data Consistency

Data is consistent across your systems. If a centralized Master Data is used, it is possible to feed it via this solution.