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A Decade of Satisfaction
Durham, North Carolina is widely known as the “City of
Medicine,” for good reason – one of every four workers is
employed in a health-related field, and the city boasts
quadruple the national average of physicians and triple that of
nurses. Durham Internal Medicine cares for over 100,000 patients
a year. They manage this with a talented, dedicated staff and a
linked pair of information systems that allows for accurate and
efficient recordkeeping of their large patient base.
An IMPAC client for over a decade, Durham uses IMPAC’s
laboratory information system (LIS). They like the system for
its efficiency and ease in navigating between multiple records,
and especially for its reliability and consistency.
Quick Access to Lab Results
Individual physician offices place the orders for tests. When
the patient reports to the lab for a blood draw, their record is
accessed to verify the exact test, which is then barcoded on the
specimen. A bidirectional interface with the instruments orders
the appropriate test(s), with results then exported back to the
lab’s computers and automatically transferred to the patient’s
file – allowing for quick access to relevant lab results as
needed by physicians.
Quality Assurance and Remote Monitoring
According to Robert Calderwood, Durham lab supervisor, “The
quality assurance we’ve experienced with IMPAC has been great.
It’s only rare that we have a problem, and when we do, someone
will be on it within an hour, if not immediately. The ‘PC
Anywhere’ feature has been a big help – IMPAC can dial into our
system and troubleshoot an issue as though they were here.”
Calderwood also has great praise for Phone HomeDiagnostics
(PhD), IMPAC’s remote diagnosis software feature. One day last
year, Durham got a phone call from IMPAC, “informing us they had
remotely detected that our server had gone to battery backup,”
recalled Calderwood. No one in the lab had realized
that
anything was amiss – but, sure enough, a close examination of
the server revealed that it somehow had accidentally become
unplugged. The phone call from IMPAC allowed the team time
to
save their work and shut down all stations, before any data
was
lost.
“IMPAC’s remote diagnosis saved us extensive recovery of
electronic data,” attested Calderwood. “We were impressed by the
alert, excited they were able to catch it, and relieved to not
have lost an afternoon’s worth of work.”
Accuracy Makes the Difference
Calderwood is familiar with LIS products used by other
facilities, and is understandably wary of their intermittent
problems that require frequent restarts, as the likelihood of
error increases exponentially with each failure. “An unstable
system is just too much of a liability,” Calderwood observed.
“If it’s unsteady, you then also have to worry about the things
that you don’t see or notice. We just don’t have those problems
with IMPAC.” |
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