Healthcare organizations all over North America are hopping on the AnyWare Group’s pioneering eHealth remote access platform
Written by Anne-Frances Hutchinson Produced by Tom Cunningham
An operating system-agnostic healthcare information solution that integrates legacy systems, shortens hospital wait times, eliminates environmental restrictions, improves physician efficiency and enables fixed and predictable operating costs?
Until fairly recently, healthcare administrators would pass off the idea as an ambitious but untenable IT department dream. Enter AnyWare Group, a Toronto-based healthcare information technology developer with an innovative, fully managed service that bridges distances and disciplines to deliver timely patient information between systems and clinicians.
With ROAM, clinicians use the existing applications to access patient information and diagnostics as they always have, but with critical advantages: the data can be accessed from any device that has a web browser with the software they’re most familiar with, without the need to install applications on every device.
To date, more than 100 hospitals in North America have adopted AnyWare’s ROAM platform. Earlier this year, AnyWare Group caught the attention of health information technology research giant IDC Canada, which named ROAM one of Canada’s 10 most innovative healthcare solutions to watch.
Single source solution
While it’s possible to build a multiple vendor remote access solution, AnyWare’s unique single vendor approach mitigates the significant financial and technological risks associated with ‘do it yourself,’ multi-vendor solutions.
“We reduce the number of vendors, plus it’s a managed service so we take care of everything on behalf of the hospital. That reduces costs and the complexity of the IT team,” notes CEO Robert Lalonde. “Our technology will run on any PC. If one physician is traveling and is now in a hotel or in a kiosk, there’s no need to install any software on their PC. He or she can get access to all the systems in the hospital remotely, without any installation, without any IT intervention, and regardless of whether it is a Mac or a PC or something else. The whole clientless aspect is quite unique. Most systems require you to install applications on your PC and have IT get involved in managing that, so when we say universal access it is truly access from anywhere.”
New Brunswick recently became the first jurisdiction in North America to implement a province or state-wide information sharing system for health-care workers. “The New Brunswick project is exciting because we’ve got almost 3,000 health care workers using our system,” Lalonde says. “This is universal access to all systems province-wide, regardless of whether they are provincial, jurisdictional or hospital level systems. All systems are made available to physicians and healthcare workers regardless of where they reside.”
The provincial project began as a single sale to Atlantic Health Sciences in Saint John, NB. “We started working with them on their remote access needs, and as it expanded beyond just that hospital to multiple hospitals, people started realizing the benefits of actually having an integrated remote access solution,” he adds. “What you end up with through our solution is one single pane of glass or one portal page with systems from multiple locations, multiple hospitals, all with one access point and one set of logins.”
E-to-E equals efficiency
In an industry where efficiency equates not only with improved performance but improved quality of care, AnyWare Group is offering a long-desired link to overall performance improvement. By dramatically streamlining the sign-on process, clinicians can save valuable time and money.
“Even if it’s 500 physicians and you gain them 15 minutes each a week, those are huge cost reductions. You’re talking on the order of millions of dollars over the course of the year and significant improvements in efficiency and higher productivity,” Lalonde stresses. “Doctors usually don’t want to know about the IT technology. They just want it to work and be transparent. We had a chief of staff get up at a meeting about a month ago and say, ‘this is the best IT investment we’ve ever made,’ because they’re getting an impact.”
Eliminating distance also translates to faster and potentially better care for patients in remote and rural areas who must travel long distances for consultations with specialists. “One of the big things we’ve seen an improvement of is the ability to get faster consults from a physician or expert that may not be present,” Lalonde said. ”If someone has a stroke up in Miramichi and they need to get a consult from someone in Fredericton that can be done in a matter of minutes through our system.”
The company has a thorough knowledge of the hundreds of applications used to store and view diagnostic and imaging information. “There are so many legacy applications in healthcare; that will never change. We have the experience to go into a hospital and say, ‘you’ve got these 10 or 50 applications, we’ve seen them all before. Let’s get to work.’ We can be up and running in two weeks. That’s pretty unique as well.”
The future of disease management
AnyWare’s ROAM solution is a boon to physicians, administrators and patients, and one that is well positioned to evolve with the industry. The firm is currently exploring the solution as a tool for patient-driven chronic disease management as well.
“You can dramatically lower the cost of patient management and chronic disease management, specifically for diseases where there’s lots of physician interaction at a very, very high cost. You can reduce those costs and improve patient care by providing self management solutions so that more people can have educational material they need to track and manage themselves,” Lalonde postulates. “So the same portal that New Brunswick is using for 3,000 employees could be used for 50,000 of its patients as well. That’s the trend we’re seeing nationally.”
“As costs continue to rise, and rates for specific chronic diseases are going up, you need a better way to manage them. The face-to-face, walk into the hospital to be treated and to be checked on is extremely expensive; so the more you can do in an automated fashion through the Internet, the lower your costs are going to be,” Lalonde says.
Convenience may also provide another important benefit: patient compliance. “The more convenient it is for the patient, the more they just might do something about their condition as opposed to leaving it untreated.” He adds, “To me, that’s the future of healthcare.” It’s a bright one, for sure.
View Digital Corporate Profile of Anyware in Healthcare Digital August 2009