COMPANY: Amcare’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s (Baodao campus, Beijing)
CHALLENGE: Execute a TrakCare implementation during the emerging pandemic, to allow for easier access to medical information.
OUTCOME: A successful, partly remote, implementation brought vital IT tools to clinicians whose duty to serve patients had never been so imperative and imperiled.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people in China did whatever they could to avoid hospitals. But as the outbreak grew and communities enacted stay-at-home restrictions, one team from InterSystems ran to the frontlines.
Six employees set up camp at Amcare’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital’s Baodao campus, in Beijing, to execute a TrakCare implementation. Their work had never been so important. Amid the emerging pandemic, clinicians still needed to perform the specialized hospital group’s key function: safely marshalling women through pregnancy. After all, nothing would stop babies from being born. And that task required easier access to the information that matters.
“We have seen medical workers who are sticking to their posts to fight the virus,” says Luciano Brustia, regional managing director for Asia Pacific at InterSystems. “Thanks to them, the medical needs of the Chinese people are being met.”
The employees, including technical and application specialists and a project manager, executed the implementation alongside three remote technicians in February. They wore face masks and avoided public transportation to safely get the job done. TrakCare went live in the hospital later that month, empowering physicians to provide uninterrupted pregnancy tests and other gynecological, obstetrical, pediatric, and reproductive care throughout the pandemic. The project, it turned out, brought vital IT tools to clinicians whose duty to serve patients had never been so imperative and imperiled.
In the following months, InterSystems employees remained connected to customers in Chinese healthcare organizations. TrakCare experts provided round-the-clock technical support, remote coordination, and on-site services.
The implementation at Amcare’s Baodao campus stemmed from a 2016 partnership between the private hospital group and InterSystems. By this February, TrakCare had already gone live in three facilities and one clinic in Beijing. Amcare and InterSystems understood that the company’s newest acquisition, the Baodao facility, couldn’t wait for the unified healthcare information system. Once launched, TrakCare would establish a single source of truth for clinical, administrative, and financial information, with the insights to fuel stronger clinical decision making and support care collaboration.
While the implementation occurred at the height of China’s struggle with COVID-19, its implications will span far beyond the pandemic, helping the next generation of children enter the post-pandemic world unharmed.
This story originally appeared the July 20, 2020- OnTrak News Flash No.5: The Fight Against COVID-19 newsletter
