Health First Quickly Integrates and Customizes Sunrise Clinical Manager™ Using ObjectsPlus/XA™

As part of its health information technology (HIT) strategy, Health First’s three hospitals are migrating from stand-alone clinical, emergency, pharmacy and surgery information systems to an integrated set of advanced Eclipsys solutions, including Sunrise Clinical Manager, Sunrise Emergency Care™, Eclipsys end-to-end medication management solutions and Sunrise Surgery™, powered by Surgical Information Systems.

Physician utilization of the new solutions was key to the organization’s long-term HIT strategy. The Health First implementation team therefore focused on physician solutions during the first phase of its three phase rollout of Sunrise Clinical Manager. Health First leveraged ObjectsPlus, the Eclipsys open object initiative that exposes the core objects and components of Sunrise Clinical Manager, to enable a seamless integration of several patient information systems with Sunrise Clinical Manager. With these exposed objects, a healthcare organization’s IT staff can quickly and easily extend Eclipsys clinical solutions to communicate with other clinical, non-clinical and legacy systems and easily customize the system to specific needs.

A three-person development team was able to integrate the legacy systems in just six weeks, without draining IT resources or overburdening development staff. After another six weeks of testing, the integrated solution was rolled out to clinicians.

A Solution for Patient Data Availability
As part of the migration to Eclipsys Sunrise solutions, the Health First implementation team knew that some patient data would not be immediately available to physicians. Nurses were still documenting patient vital signs, fluid intake and output (IOs), patient care notes and allergies in the legacy clinical system, and Emergency Department vital signs and medication orders still resided in separate proprietary systems.

According to Brian Crowe, SQL database administrator at Health First, a solution was readily available from Eclipsys with ObjectsPlus/XA, which was used to build four custom tabs: Vitals, Fluid IO, Active Medications and Patient Care Notes. To build physician acceptance, Health First made sure the new custom tabs in Clinical Manager matched the appearance of its secure physicians’ portal. “When the physicians are using either the portal or Clinical Manager, they’re seeing the same theme, graphs and displays,” said Crowe. “We kept everything uniform to make it as easy as possible for them to adapt to the new technology.”

Now, as Crowe and his team continue the implementation of Clinical Manager, a physician examining a patient is able to see up-to-the-minute test results, nursing observations, vitals and fluid IOs from the time the patient enters the hospital or emergency room. The combined data is displayed in custom-designed graphs and numeric tables. Items such as heart rate, blood pressure and fingerstick glucose can be selected individually or all at once, and viewed from the start of the patient chart.

The Benefits
ObjectsPlus has enabled Health First physicians to utilize existing applications and take advantage of the functionality of Sunrise Clinical Manager during the early stages of its implementation. Physicians can now view comprehensive patient data that previously resided in disparate systems.

“The end product was a success,” Crowe said. “We fulfilled all of the physicians’ requirements to bring all patient data into Clinical Manager and made it look like an original part of the application. Physicians could find everything they were looking for in one place.”

As the ambitious rollout continues, Health First will implement Eclipsys Knowledge-Based Charting™ for nursing staff and Knowledge-Based Orders™. The custom tabs will no longer be necessary after the organization completes the first two phases of the Clinical Manager implementation.

But Health First has seen the possibilities and has more plans for ObjectsPlus. “We are going to be building on our successes and exploring new ideas for customization,” said Crowe. “ObjectsPlus offers unlimited possibilities, and it doesn’t take a lot of work to build a creative custom solution for our end users.”