Nursing Informatics

Customer Profile

The Public Health Nursing Department promotes the well being of the community and prevents disease, disability and premature death. Public health nurses (PHNs) make home visits to families with communicable diseases, emphasize nutrition, disease prevention and health; and improves the quality of neighborhood life by working in partnership with community.

Business Problems

• Inefficiency- The PHNs handle multiple paper based forms Redundancy- Multiple copies of information exist
• Errors- Use of multiple paper-forms increases the chances of errors
• Tracking- Interventions provided to the community has to be tracked by index case, family and household which is difficult using current paper-based forms
• Workflow Management- Supervisors cannot review and allocate work due to absence of review mechanism
• Data Collation- Difficult to organize and collate data for reporting to County, State, Federal agencies
• Data Evaluation- Paper forms do not provide for an easy or quick way to analyze & interpret data and identify trends
• Data Sharing- Cannot share data with other County programs providing complimentary services

Solution Overview

CAL2CAL developed a browser-based “open” Case Management System. This system has the ability to track multiple interventions given over a period of time by index case, family and household. It provides a powerful and secure departmental work-flow, assignment/ task management and reporting tool with intuitive interface design that minimizes training and transition costs. The system allows for various levels of user permissions and tailored views and reports. The “open” architecture allows the system to communicate with other Public Health initiatives under development at the client. A planned field unit extension will allow deployment on appropriate mobile devices for data access in the field.

Technology Used

Browser based user interface and business logic built using Visual Studio .NET. Data store has been deployed on SQL Server 2000. The solution is hosted on IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 with .NET Framework.

Potential Benefits

Increased productivity by eliminating redundant paperwork; Ability to lookup past information and identify prior interventions to reduce duplicate data entry; Efficient allocation of cases within PHNs; Reduction in errors due to validation and assisted data entry; Reduction in data entry due to intelligent data management; Ability to centralize data and manage individual caseloads; identification of trends and statistical analyses within a population group; Integration with Public Health Information Network initiatives; Computation of Acuity levels.