King Abdullah University Hospital recently embarked on its Digital Transformation journey as part of a wider strategy to modernise the legacy healthcare information system that had multiple technical issues and left many users within the hospital dissatisfied. Eng Anas Matalka, IT Director, King Abdullah University Hospital, tells Intelligent CIO Middle East how the hospital computerised its healthcare information system in an effort to go paperless.
Digital Transformation is sweeping across almost every industry, including healthcare. One hospital that recently embarked on its Digital Transformation journey is King Abdullah University Hospital, one of the largest in Jordan. With help from DXC Technology, the hospital has designed, installed and implemented a state-of-the-art healthcare information system that provides end-to-end information while helping control costs and improve patient care.
King Abdullah University Hospital (KAUH) serves nearly 1 million local residents. As part of its mission to be a leading healthcare facility, it provides advanced patient services from several locations. It’s also a teaching hospital affiliated with the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
While KAUH strives to have the best possible technologies and devices, its legacy healthcare information system had multiple technical issues and left many users within the hospital dissatisfied.
To improve this situation, King Abdullah University Hospital chose DXC to help implement a health information system that provided secure, end-to-end information services. These services would include data analysis and various administrative functions.
DXC first helped KAUH develop a new IT infrastructure. Then the two partners implemented the healthcare information system and integrated the hospital’s various services.
“We rely on DXC completely to provide our electronic services,” said Eng Anas Matalka, IT Director, King Abdullah University Hospital.
State of the art information
Among the project’s main initiatives was a computerised medical file containing complete details on all the hospital’s patients. This information needed to be available, easily and quickly, to the hospital’s physicians and other healthcare practitioners. King Abdullah University Hospital administrators knew that having fast and accurate access to this kind of information would be critical, especially in intensive care, where fast decisions can literally become matters of life and death. Yet the system would also need to keep all patient information strictly private and highly secure.
“You need the help of reliable companies, because you need to deal with programming and both advanced and developed solutions.” said Dr Ibrahim Al Faouri, Chief Nursing Officer and Head of Quality, King Abdullah University Hospital.
All that has helped the hospital’s departments and functions. On the nursing side, the new system helps keep patient data precise and accredited. On the quality side, it helps maintain data accuracy. The system also helps KAUH’s physicians write accurate prescriptions by tracking the availability of medications in the hospital’s pharmacy. And for administrators, the system has helped improve the speed with which appointments are scheduled and tracked. This system has also helped KAUH qualify for Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC), which validates the skills of information security professionals.
“It’s a fast and comprehensive system,” said Dr Suleiman Momany, Chief Medical Officer and Internal, Chest, Intensive-care and Pathology Specialist, King Abdullah University Hospital. “It provides all the medical services we need and without any restrictions.”
“We’re proud of our longstanding and long lasting partnership with DXC,” added Prof Ismail Matalka, CEO, King Abdullah University Hospital. “We’re working together to continuously improve and upgrade our health information system.”
Training gains
However, change is rarely easy and some of the hospital’s staff initially resisted using the new healthcare information system. To help overcome this resistance and increase usage, DXC has provided continuous staff training.
This training has delivered other benefits, too. Some staff members have found that the training opens new opportunities for them, both within the hospital and at other healthcare centres in Jordan and abroad. Training provided by DXC has also helped the hospital’s technical and logistics teams cope with the new and updated devices.
As part of the work, DXC helped the King Abdullah University Hospital to apply best practices not only with the new healthcare information system, but also throughout the hospital. This has improved overall ease and speed, in part by providing more comfort to the patients and creating a greater sense of trust. Smart usage of the system has lowered costs for the hospital, patients and insurers alike, even as it helps increase the number of patient visits. That, in turn, has increased the hospital’s income.
Going paperless
The improvements Prof Matalka refers to include King Abdullah University Hospital’s new status as Jordan’s first fully computerised and paperless hospital. This advance has simplified both the recording of patient information and the generation of reports based on that data. “Patient information and medical procedures are accurate, as they are controlled by the system,” added Dr Khaldoon Bashaireh, Deputy CEO, King Abdullah University Hospital.
King Abdullah University Hospital now plans to transform itself into a “smart hospital” by connecting all devices used internally to the medical information system. One important goal of this effort will be to dramatically reduce the number of errors introduced during information entry, which was formerly done by hand.
The hospital also hopes to take advantage of DXC’s long experience helping other customers in healthcare. Together, DXC and King Abdullah University Hospital are readying several new IT projects, including the creation of mobile apps that will be used by both patients and staff. Dr Al Faouri said: “We trust DXC to always get the latest technology.”
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