Prevent Hospital System Issues Using Active Monitoring and Test Automation

In this episode of TWIHT, we discuss how to actively monitor hospital systems data integrity. It is a big challenge to monitor hundreds of systems in a health system to ensure workflows and data are working as expected. This prevents having to rely on users to report issues and prevent extensive downtime.
Vik describes a typical scenario in how most issues are dealt with today in a health system. He uses an example of an ED system. A user in emergency department places a lab order and if there is an issue with getting the result back, after waiting for 20-30min, the user then will report the issue to information technology help desk.
Help desk will then message the integration team so they can check if the issue is with the result interfaces. Integration engineer will check the interfaces and then determine if there is an issue or not. By this time it is already 45-60min. Once integration team determines it is not an issue with interfaces, then they will open a task with the ED system vendor because at this point it is clear that there is some other issue with displaying the result in the ED system.
This example shows that in health systems today, there is no automated process to prevent system issues and prevent long unscheduled downtimes which affect patient care.
With an automated hospital systems data monitoring, within a min, an issue can be identified, and process of notifying the right parties can start immediately. This way a fix can be in place as soon as possible to minimize system downtime and avoid adverse patient events because of system issues.
This problem of avoiding system issues has been in place for a long time, and it is challenging to actively monitor workflows and data integrity within 100s of hospital systems, however, our team at Tido Inc. has developed an active monitoring application to help identify issues instantly.
Relying on users to report issues in all electronic systems is a very frustrating issue for care providers and instead of focusing on patient care, they are having to deal with system issues. 
Vik provides another example where because of a workflow change in the EMR system, how it can affect downstream systems. EMR and hospital systems test automation can help avoid these issues (check last episode for more details), however, even test automation cannot guarantee avoidance of issues in live environment. This is where active systems integrity monitoring can catch issues before they turn into longer downtimes or affect patient care because of missing critical data.


Website: http://www.thisweekinhealthtech.com
Twitter: @TWIHT1
Tido Inc.: https://www.tidoinc.com/
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Linkedin: Vik Patel
Linkedin: Jimmy Kim

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Vik Patel - LinkedIn
Tido Inc. - Website
Tido Inc. - LinkedIn