Windows 10 injects digital transformation into healthcare

Windows 10 injects digital transformation into healthcare

This community of health care providers understand how integral a secure and productive IT infrastructure is to the delivery of quality healthcare to individuals and populations. We know the faster practitioners can access data safely and securely, the faster patients can receive care and get critical test results back.

This week, I’m pleased to share how some of the country’s top healthcare organizations – ProMedica Laboratories and Adventist Health Systems – are deploying Windows 10 to empower its healthcare professionals to continue delivering quality and timely healthcare. It’s been exciting to see our customers upgrade to Windows 10 at an incredible pace, with a 3X increase in Windows 10 enterprise deployments over the last few months.

We also know that protecting and securing patient data is just as important as delivering quality and timely healthcare for our healthcare providers like ProMedica Laboratories and Adventist Health Systems who are deploying Windows 10. Healthcare is one of the most regulated environments given the sensitive patient data that must be secured and protected. Despite significant protections over the last few years, health providers and payers in the industry are being subjected to an increasing number of cyber-attacks. Healthcare providers need to consider end-to-end security of their IT infrastructure more than ever.

With Windows 10 being the most secure version of Windows ever, we continue to hear from our healthcare customers who want to know how Windows 10 meets the technical and administrative safeguards required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) which provides data privacy and security provisions for individual personal health information. While a number of the HIPPA requirements are not relevant to an operating system such as organizational documentation retention policies, a significant number remain important. I am excited to share that we commissioned HIPPA One, an organization recognized as leading HIPPA experts to review Windows 10 and its new security features as it relates to HIPPA safeguards and provide recommendations on the best configurations to assist with compliance requirements. You can learn more via the white paper hosted by HIPPA One which can help healthcare IT professionals understand HIPPA and how they can configure Windows 10 to help keep their IT systems running on Windows 10 secure and compliant.

Here’s a look at how Windows 10 is helping to drive digital innovation in the healthcare industry.

ProMedica Laboratories

ProMedica Laboratories is a highly automated complex operation and one of only 43 ISO certified labs in the United States. Each day, they process and analyze thousands of biological samples, requiring the testing instruments to be kept operational and calibrated to meet regulatory requirements. Ensuring these tasks were completed and documented was an arduous process and it used to be done the old fashion way: with lots of paperwork.

In U.S. hospitals alone, over a billion patient blood tests are processed annually.* These tests range from simply determining a patient’s blood type to more critical testing for diabetes or cancer. At ProMedica, they know the success of a patient’s treatment plan depends on the accuracy and timeliness of these tests.

ProMedica Laboratories needed a better way to perform routine quality inspections and equipment maintenance. In addition, a systematic process was needed to detect any errors that may have occurred along the way. To do this, ProMedica Laboratories partnered with software company Kaonsoft, member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to build the Assured Compliance Solution (ACS) on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). The Kaonsoft team has decades of digital transformation and mobility expertise which it brought forward on the ProMedica project.

ACS replaced all paper logs with Windows 10 tablets, which provided security, manageability and an extra layer of data protection. The solution tracks all scheduled instrument activity and notifies them with a chain of alerts until a required task is completed. ProMedica Laboratories now has a centralized database hosted on Microsoft Azure, the trusted and reliable cloud to record and review equipment status, access records and run audit reports, all in real-time – resulting in a 100% compliance rate for log accuracy and task completion since implementing it in January 2016.

Lori Johnston, CIO, ProMedica says, “Transforming from a paper based system to a digital process means we can more precisely deliver the most important information: the results. And for individuals and families under the stress of a potential medical situation, nothing is more imperative than timely and accurate results. Creating ACS on Windows 10 and the Microsoft Cloud helps ProMedica Labs work faster and smarter. Better information, better treatment, better healthcare.”

With the ACS UWP app, ProMedica Laboratories can now decrease the time patients spend in the hospital due to an increase in laboratory efficiency. ProMedica Laboratories is also seeing an increase in productivity for technicians, supervisors, management and executives as they’re saving an average of 13 hours each month, 156 hours per year, in managing, troubleshooting and filing maintenance logs. As a result, the productivity of technicians, supervisors, management and executives has risen.

“I am thrilled to see technology and healthcare working in tandem to enable advancements in the healthcare and hospital management fields,” said Daniel J. Lee, Kaonsoft chief technology officer, co-founder and CEO. The success of the collaboration prompted ProMedica to partner with Kaonsoft to form Kapios Health, a joint venture company focused on developing mobile technology to spearhead innovations in healthcare. Kapios Health enables healthcare practitioners to provide exemplary patient care supported by sophisticated industry-inspired, field-tested mobile technology solutions. ACS is available through Kapios Health who will be exhibiting at HIMSS17 in Orlando, FL at booth 8068.

Adventist Health System

Adventist Health System is a faith-based health care organization based in Altamonte Springs, Florida. A national leader in quality, safety and patient satisfaction with 45 hospital campuses and more than 80,000 employees, Adventist Health System facilities leverage the latest technology and research to serve more than 4.7 million patients annually.  The organization is upgrading more than 55,000 devices running Windows 7 to Windows 10, with a goal of 25 percent of its devices in the first year.

Tony Qualls, director of technical services says, “Our experience to-date with Windows 10 and application compatibility has truly exceeded our expectations. At this point, it looks like we will exceed the first year goal that we were looking for, and it’s likely we’ll accelerate beyond that over the next two years. The Windows 10 upgrade will help bring about improved mobility for physicians, stronger security and easier authentication to improve the operational efficiency of staff.”

In a profession where speed, reliability and security are vital to delivering the best care possible, Adventist Health System is working to ensure that its health care professionals are able to access data securely and from any device whether they’re at a workstation in a patient’s room or walking the hallways with their mobile device.

Qualls says, “As I look towards the future, I’m also excited about faster authentication and lower reliance on passwords. We already see some potential high value cases, especially involving mobility, where facial recognition with Windows Hello could make a big difference. The faster our practitioners can access their data, the faster our patients can receive care.”

This is not the only area where speed has positively impacted the day-to-day operations, doctors have experienced notable performance improvements to patient critical applications. According to Dr. Qammer Bokhari, vice president and chief medical information officer, “Windows 10 is in clinician’s word, ‘lighter’, meaning the clinician platforms that run on Windows 10 are performing faster and they’re not crashing or freezing as they were previously, thereby diminishing workflow interruptions.”

We’re excited to see what these customers and others will be able to accomplish with the power of Windows 10. Please visit the Windows solutions for Health page for more information on how Windows 10 helps healthcare companies, professionals and patients.

*AMERICAN CLINICAL LABORATORY ASSOCIATION

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