Surface Deploys to More Healthcare Professionals Than Ever Before
We’ve shared before how Surface is helping increase efficiency in the health care industry and enabling health care professionals to improve the interactions they have with their patients.
This week, we are making a series of announcements and talking with health organizations at the HIMSS Annual Conference in Orlando about the growing need for clinicians to have instant and secure mobile access to patient health records through fully functional, clinical-grade devices – all to provide better care for patients through the full power of Surface.
We have several new healthcare industry customers using Surface along with notable healthcare accessories from our partners, including:
Seattle Children’s Hospital specializes in meeting the unique physical, emotional and developmental needs of children from infancy through young adulthood. Surface Pro, in partnership with VitalHub, allows Seattle Children’s to provide clinicians with a modern, touch-enabled user interface for a leading electronic medical record (EMR) vendor while also allowing adherence to HIPAA and other strict security regulations in Healthcare. The app combined with Microsoft Surface Pro allows Seattle Children’s staff to view and have basic levels of simple order entry through a touch enabled interface—improving the experience of both physician and patient.
Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (NMCRS), which was founded in 1904 to help service members and their families in times of difficulty, has a worldwide visiting nurse program for Navy families. NMCRS has implemented a Windows 8 app on Surface dedicated to helping its visiting nurses provide better home health patient care experiences to new mothers associated with the Navy Marine Corps. NMCRS has visiting nurses around the globe that have each been provided with a Surface so they can use the application to access patient EMRs in near real-time, facilitate faster communication with other clinicians and physicians, and easily answer health related questions asked during visits.
Aegis Living, a national leader in senior assisted living and memory care facilities, has equipped their staff with Surface tablets to help them with resident care and medication administration. With senior living communities across three states, Aegis embraces innovation and provides the highest level of care and service to each of their residents. By using Surface to manage the distribution of medication to all of their residents, they have eliminated paper-based medication records and manual prescription auditing. Everything is now updated and recorded in real time in a more secure and precise manner. This has greatly reduced the chance of human error associated with handwritten notes, and staff are reminded to check resident’s vitals before administering medications. Before adopting Surface, Aegis told us that it took two employees and two days out of each month at each of their communities to perform a manual monthly audit of prescription records. Now with Surface, they’ve experienced incredible productivity gains–completely eliminating this monthly audit—and are able to review data in real time, whenever they need it. That is a savings of over 11,000 hours per year, a tremendous savings in time!
Community Health Accreditation Program (CHAP) is the nation’s oldest community-based accrediting body, with approximately more than 5,000 providers and 10,000 sites currently accredited, and 85 field auditors continuously working to hold agencies accountable for patient care. CHAP is now using Surface Pro devices to support their new CHAP LinQ accreditation software and provide an important tool for site visitors to observe, interview and document information seamlessly while conducting their visits. Surface Pro’s unique features, such as the kickstand and digitized pen, work in conjunction with the CHAP LinQ software to enable CHAP’s field auditors to capture more accurate and systematic documentation and ultimately provide the highest quality of home and community-based care.
In addition to the new customers announced at HIMSS, Surface continues to grow in existing customers, including Pediatric Associates, an 85-doctor practice in Bellevue, WA, who rolled out Greenway Medical Technologies’ Windows 8 app on Surface Pro 2 to their caregivers. The app allows their medical assistants to record patient information, vital numbers, allergy information, and much more in a safe and secure location. Physicians are saving time—potentially gaining 1-3 appointments per day—by only inputting patient data once, and being able to quickly access and review patient information prior to meeting with them. For more information, see the video with Brock Morris, CIO from Pediatric Associates.
Accessories for Surface designed explicitly for the Healthcare Industry
There are several examples of how Surface can be mounted to medical carts from manufacturers, including Anthro Corporation, Ergotron, Inc., ProClip USA and RAM Mounting Systems, which enable health care practitioners to record and access information as needed—keeping their hands free to handle medication—but also remove the device when they need to be more mobile. Because Surface has such great flexibility, staff can access resident data wherever they are, whether it’s at resident’s bedside to distribute medication, checking vitals or moving from an office to a resident’s room.
In the healthcare industry, patient well-being is dependent upon the best possible care and most accurate information, so having the right tools can make all the difference. These customers are experiencing first-hand the positive impacts of having a reliable solution like Surface working for them.
For more details about healthcare and other industries choosing Surface for business, visit surface.com/business.
Cyril Belikoff
Director, Surface