Summary

Recent studies show that patients who are engaged meaningfully in their healthcare recover faster, have fewer readmissions, and enjoy better outcomes. So it’s not surprising that healthcare facilities are paying more attention to the care experience they offer patients. Faced with the challenge of improving quality of care for an increasing number of patients while struggling with rising costs and shrinking budgets, healthcare facilities are eager for new solutions that really make a difference.

Oneview Healthcare recognized the market for a patient engagement solution back in 2007, but its initial product, built on an open-source platform, fell short of the great potential they envisioned. Then the company turned to Microsoft technologies to develop the Oneview Patient Engagement and Clinical Workflow Solution, which delivers a dynamic series of multimedia education and coaching goals personalized for each patient based upon the clinical purpose of their hospital admission. The platform also speeds clinician access to mission-critical hospital tools like electronic health records, MRIs, X-Rays, real-time location systems, and automation of hourly nurse rounding visits to the patient’s bedside.

The fact that the Oneview solution interoperates with most healthcare clinical systems is a huge competitive advantage. More than 85 percent of the clinical tools that hospitals trust are Windows-based systems, so Oneview customers enjoy the solution’s easy integration with their IT environment, which reduces implementation costs and speeds time-to-benefit. The solution provides an open, extensible platform that customers can use to improve point-of-care access to productivity-enhancing mobile apps. It also enhances patient care, improves clinical workflows, and increases efficiency for healthcare administrators.

These benefits—delivered on a familiar, highly secure, and scalable platform that is available in a cloud-based version running in the Microsoft Azure environment—add up to a transformational solution that is one of the fastest-growing Interactive Patient Care solution seen in the last two years.

The full story

In 2007, Oneview Healthcare founder and President Mark McCloskey set out to build a solution based on the premise that the more engaged patients are with their healthcare, the better the outcome. Recent research in the United States reports that engaged patients are 50 percent less likely to be readmitted within 30 days, and that patients with the highest levels of engagement are 31 percent less expensive to care for than those at the lowest activation levels.*

Under pressure to deliver higher-quality services to more people at lower costs, healthcare facilities are taking note of these studies. In 2013, 70 percent of hospitals ranked patient experience as their top priority.** “We’re seeing patient experience officers at C-suite levels,” says McCloskey, “and that’s going to be the norm in the future.”

Why a Windows-based solution?

In 2007, patient experience was a nascent trend in the health industry. When Oneview licensed an existing solution that ran on the Linux operating system, it realized quickly that this technology did not integrate well with customer environments, nor did it meet their security requirements. “Recognizing the growing importance for interoperability with mission-critical hospital applications, we used Microsoft technologies to build our own solution called the Oneview Patient Engagement and Clinical Workflow Solution,” says Phillip Urrea, Chief Technology Officer at Oneview Healthcare. “From an efficient development environment to interoperability, data security, cloud options, mobility, and ease of use, the Oneview solution running in a Windows environment meets customer requirements and gives us an eminently marketable solution.”

Oneview had no problem finding talented developers to build the solution, which was a boon to Urrea in the company’s early days. “It was easy to find people with experience in ASP.NET ] to build the clinical tools in the Oneview solution to run on different mobile computing devices. We also use the Windows Presentation Foundation to create an immersive user interface that encourages patient engagement.”

The Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2014 data management software, running in a virtualized environment based on Hyper-V virtualization technology, support the Oneview solution at a customer’s datacenter. A cloud version is also available to run in the Microsoft Azure cloud computing environment.

A single view of patient data

The solution seeks to provide “one view” of the hospital’s clinical information systems, accessible in the patient’s room from bedside tablets, workstations, and wall-mounted televisions, all running Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry. Hospital clients can customize multimedia educational content, doctor’s instructions, and dietary options for each patient. The system provides an exciting customizable entertainment platform, too.

“While the patient is watching a movie, educational content—such as a video about a newly prescribed medication—pops up for their review,” says Jeff Fallon, President, North America, at Oneview Healthcare. “The solution tests comprehension, documents the completion of the educational component, and allows patients to post questions to doctors and nurses. Patients also use the system at home where Oneview can be accessed through a single sign-on to the hospital’s patient portal to access pre- and post-procedure education and coaching, to communicate with their care team, and to book appointments.”

Boosting point-of-care efficiency

The Oneview solution harnesses the power of IT at the point of care, providing a single platform to educate patients and improve the efficiency of hospital staff. Clinicians are more mobile and more productive because they can access patient data from one system at any time on any device. At the bedside, the Oneview solution facilitates patient education—for example, doctors can screencast an X-ray onto the patient’s TV to discuss their findings with a patient.

In addition, the Oneview solution works with hospitals’ communications and real-time location systems (RTLS), enhancing nursing efficiency and patient care. “Nurses who are busy performing clinical work are no longer interrupted with nonclinical tasks,” says Fallon. “The Oneview solution empowers patients to directly message nonclinical staff, such as nurse’s aides, dieticians, or environmental services. Oneview can escalate these service recovery calls to ensure timely resolution and improve patient satisfaction scores. Through RTLS integration, staff can quickly locate equipment such as crash carts by viewing the RTLS application on the Oneview platform wherever they are—no small feat when finding the nearest crash cart can be a matter of life and death.”

The Oneview solution corresponds with the latest tech megatrend—the Internet of Things (IoT), or an integrated, interconnected network of devices—to deliver long-term health benefits. For example, “Our system can work with glucometers as an IoT device and stream that data back to the patient’s clinician for monitoring,” says Urrea.

The extensible platform advantage

Interoperability delivers another competitive advantage for Oneview because the company can accommodate customers who want to adapt the solution to meet evolving needs. “Hospitals are eager to innovate and to create their own apps, but they quickly realize that they need an inpatient platform to deploy those apps. Oneview offers the answer to this as we give our customers a software development kit and publish our application programming interfaces so they are free to autonomously build and deploy applications that look and work the way they want. Don’t try that with a first-generation platform!” says Fallon.

Following on its two years of significant customer growth, Oneview plans to branch out into long-term and ambulatory care settings where its value proposition is already resonating strongly. “Building the Oneview solution as a Windows-based offering was key to our success,” concludes Fallon. “Health facilities of every kind can appreciate the value of a solution built on familiar technologies. The Oneview solution offers an interoperable, extensible, and highly secure platform for reducing readmissions, increasing patient satisfaction, and accelerating care team efficiency.”