Chinese General Hospital and Medical Center leveraged Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud platform designed to implement a new and better Hospital Information System (HIS) that can help improve hospital services to meet the needs of patients and employees.
With Amazon Web Services, Chinese General Hospital and Medical Center set up better management controls around its Accounting, Human Resource, as well as in other departments, streamlining their operations using a system that is running 100% cloud.
CGHMC has embraced cloud technology to modernize its systems and the hospital itself. “The systems that we first plan on doing are now all working. I think we were able to deploy HIS, Accounting, HR, SAP HANA within six months. On the eighth month, we were able to connect it with our Document Management System (DMS), and the following year, we’re able to integrate with HIS the FoxPro system,” said Jamie Francis Dy, director for ICT and data privacy officer at CGHMC.
Previous to this, CGHMC was using HIS FoxPro back in 2000 until 2016. It also attempted to implement a new HIS four times but failed. When they went live, there was a major problem and was shut down. Another factor that contributed to the failure was CGHMC spent a lot on on-premise servers that didn’t work and equipment that were not fit for deployment.
CGHMC adopted a cloud-first policy and went all-in on AWS. In 2018, the hospital migrated mission-critical business applications from on-premise data centers to AWS, including HIS and SAP HANA for its financial system.
“The only option that we have was to go 100% cloud. That’s why AWS came in and helped us a lot,” Dy said.
With cloud deployment, HIS connects to all, back and forth – admission, discharge, emergency room, outpatient and claims.
Last year, CGHMC was recognized by PhilHealth as the only hospital that had the less RTH or return to hospital because as Dy said, “everything is automated from the start, everything is there in our database and from there, we connect to PhilHealth. Before, when we have another partner, a third party, there were so many problems so we had to talk to PhilHealth and we’re able to do it directly.”
Dy also said all CGHMC patients can now see their results online in their mobile phones, make or put their appointments. The hospital is also running out a new system, a part of the patient’s portal, that’s connected to its Patient’s Concierge. Apart from these, the hospital is also doing an express admission and even express discharge.
It also has a doctor’s referral incentives to see which doctors were bringing patients to the hospital, and they’re getting incentives for it. It is a point system which is equivalent to an amount that they can use to pay for their clinics, electricity, or whatever.
Through the new platform, CGHMC has availed of the following benefits: reduced patient discharge time from 5-10 hours to 10 minutes; improved employee productivity by more than 60%; launched a mail and webhosting server in one hour; launched teleconsultation services quickly in response to COVID-19; launched Canvas LMS (open source) for the College of Medicine in two hours; and LARMS (PCR Test System) was deployed in weeks time for online results and QR code authentication.
