CIC ancora protagonista in Valle d'Aosta.

Fonte:E-Health Europe

TrakCare brings electronic patient records to the Mountains of Italy

The local health authority of Valle d'Aosta, in the mountainous northwest corner of Italy, provides medical services to approximately 118,000 residents in 74 towns.

It manages two hospitals and a clinic in Aosta, the regional capital, and a number of multi-disciplinary ambulatory care facilities that are distributed across its four districts. Overall, the authority handles approximately 22,000 hospital admissions, 50,000 emergency room episodes and approximately 220,000 ambulatory care visits per year.

Access to information with InterSystems TrakCare

The Valle d'Aosta region is marked by deep valleys that hug some of Europe's highest mountains, including Mont Blanc and Cervino. The terrain, which means that one town can only be reached by cable car, presents unique challenges to the healthcare system.

Travel between doctors' offices, clinics and hospitals can be difficult and time consuming and causes scheduling problems. In addition, productivity can be lost due to no-shows.

In some parts of Italy, the roles of general practitioner and pediatrician have become less clinical and more administrative. But in the mountain communities of Aosta, it is these practitioners who are closest and most available to the population. They remain in the best position to manage patient care - if they have access to all relevant healthcare information.

To address these challenges, the Authority chose to upgrade to the web-based InterSystems TrakCare healthcare information system.

Aosta saw how TrakCare's comprehensive, modular, fully integrated design could help to improve patient care and service, while reducing costs. At the same time, TrakCare's embedded rapid integration platform, InterSystems Ensemble, enables rapid interfacing with existing systems and avoids the cost and disruption of the "rip and replace" transitions required by competing products.

Centralized data, distributed access

The Authority began with the TrakCare Foundation modules - clinicals and patient administration, and then added laboratory, operating theater management, and billing capabilities.

All the TrakCare modules - and now the legacy systems they are integrated with - share a single electronic patient record master patient index and the single InterSystems Caché database at the heart of the TrakCare system.

With this unified architecture and web-based interface, accurate clinical and administrative information is available at any location, regardless of where it was generated. The result has been more efficient registration, scheduling, care delivery, and discharge processes.

Information from visits to Authority facilities and test results can be integrated with a physician's electronic medical record technology to provide a complete, end to end picture of a patient's medical status.

Test results are also immediately available to physicians throughout the region, as are clinical history, medications, allergies, and other vital information for making the best possible medical decisions.

With access to TrakCare scheduling capabilities available from any point in the system, citizens also have the information they need to make informed decisions about travel time, appointment location, and waiting times, as well as the ability to easily cancel or reschedule appointments.

Because of TrakCare, the Authority experiences fewer missed appointments, and can balance waiting lists among the different providers of a service.

Powerful technology, superior healthcare

The power and flexibility of TrakCare have enabled the local health authority to satisfy the needs of three audiences - the central hospital and clinicians in Aosta, local physicians throughout the region, and the citizens in need of care.

Future use of the TrakCare system calls for deeper involvement with community physicians, by enabling electronic transmission of orders for outpatient procedures and hospital admissions. These capabilities will help the Authority avoid costs related to registering these orders, further reduce errors caused by double entries, implement accurate, real-time healthcare cost monitoring systems, and respond faster to sudden peaks in demand.