Line of Business
SaaS-tainable healthcare - Cutting down on admin to focus on care
Paperwork often eats up valuable time of healthcare workers – time that would otherwise be dedicated to patient care. But a Canadian continuing healthcare facility has found the antidote to this challenge. INCLUDES VIDEO7/16/2008 6:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson
It's called long-term care – but the focus should be on the care, suggested Diane Tennant, an administrator at Marianhill Inc. based in Pembroke, Ont.
PointClickCare uses a SaaS model to assist long term care homes with their documentation.
Which means healthcare staff should not find that administrative work – filling out paperwork and sifting through patient records – are an obstacle to actually providing the care they spend so long documenting.
That's the goal of a project Tennant kicked off at her continuing care facility in 2002.
She started moving staff administrative tasks on to an application specifically tailored to the long term care industry. The application – from Mississauga, Ont.-based company, PointClickCare – is accessed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
PointClickCare invited a handful of their customers to hear about Tennant's success with the software.
"You don't want the staff spending time on charting," she says. "That's why I think the project is so valuable, staff members are actually spending more time with the resident, not flipping through papers and papers and papers trying to document the care they are providing."
Marianhill is just one of 3,000 long term care facilities across the U.S. and Canada that subscribe to the PointClickCare service.
Since its inception, in 2000, the company has grown quickly as its SaaS model proved compatible with budgeting at homes across North America.
PointClickCare has been ranked by Profit 100 magazine as one of Canada's fastest growing companies, and Deloitte Technology places it at 36 in its list of 50 fast growing companies, with a greater than five-fold increase in revenue between 2002 and 2006.
Homes that move to a paperless record-keeping system reap the time-saving benefits.
The strictly-regulated industry also needs to make documentation as efficient as possible to meet with compliance standards and prove their case for funding requirements. But a couple hurdles have to be surmounted by homes that make the switch.
The IT budget is often tight at only one per cent of total revenue, and staff not used to working with computers could find it hard to make the leap.
Page Navigation 1) Homes that move to a paperless record-keeping system reap the time-saving benefits. – Page 12) "Find a champion to take the lead." – Page 2
3) "Their introduction to the computer was letting them play solitaire." – Page 3
<< Back
