In the last week of October, Sun participated in a health care conference for Latin America in Buenos Aires, Infolac 2008. Infolac gave us the opportunity to meet health care customers in this dynamically growing part of the world, and to check out if our focus areas for health care apply to the southern hemisphere as much as to the northern hemisphere. What I didn't expect, was to find the Hospital of the future right there, in the suburbs of Buenos Aires - but that's exactly what happened.
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"El Cruce" Hospital in Florencia Valera, Argentina |
"El Cruce", that's the name of the Hospital in Florencia Valera, is part of a network of six hospitals. It is designated as a specialty hospital, a "Hospital de
Alta Complejidad". Just opened in March of 2008, it is indeed very new and modern. There are all kinds of state-of-the art modalities for imaging procedures from different vendors (mainly Philips), which allow complex procedures, for example organ transplants. |
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What is so impressive about this hospital is that is was designed from the get-go to be completely film- and paperless. Considering that in the U.S., according to a publication of the California HealthCare Foundation, only between 2% and 12% of Hospitals use EMR, with only 1.7% using comprehensive EMR, this is pretty amazing. El Cruce is therefore not only an amazing real life trip-to-the-future in Latin America, it would also be pretty unique here. I asked Dr. Puentes, a clinical pediatric Psychologist turned CIO, if they really closed the loop on the EMR with the intention to improve patient safety - and the answer is yes. Puentes explained that they support CPOE (computerized physician order entry) and scanning of patient wrist bands to reduce medical errors through prescription mistakes or medication mix-ups.
Dr. Puentes in front of the server cluster that runs all the virtualized desktops of the hospital. |
Work preparation room for doctors and nurses. Look at the SunRays, with which care providers have access to electronic medical records anywhere in the hospital. |
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In the Emergency room, for example, Doctors can access medical images as part of the EMR
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Sun technology plays an important role in this real live hospital of the future. As the pictures illustrate, they use SunRays throughout the hospital to support care providers - a critical requirement in the quest to go entirely paperless. One ER doctor explained how excited he was that he could access the hospital network securely at home in order to check on the status of his patients - a big support for him in his ambition to improve medical outcomes. Now he can alert on-site staff with specific instructions if something is not right before a catastrophic event triggers the staff to alert him. Another important piece of Sun technology is OpenESB, the HL7 messaging bus. El Cruce uses this open source analog of JCAPS to enable differnet applications, for example the Siemens PACS and the Galileo PACS from a local software house, to exchange data. So you can call up a radiology image or a lab result from the EMR, although the applications are from different vendors. |
All pictures for this Blog were kindly provided by my colleague, Don Eloy Rodriguez-Rodriguez, the business development manager for Sun in Spain, who I invited to come to Infolac to share his experience of the Spanish healthcare market with our team and partners in Argentina. You can read his Blog entries in Spanish here.
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