If hospitals and health care centers can get better communication technologies, they can provide improved health care at reduced costs.
Knowing this, Avaya has integrated real-time, intelligent communications into healthcare software applications. These applications are powered by Avaya Agile Communications Environment technology and IBM's Health Integration Framework.
Avaya Agile Communication Environment is an open software platform for building multi-vendor unified communications and Communications Enabled Business Process or “CEBP” applications.
To help healthcare providers integrate communications from nearly any vendor with clinical support applications, Avaya ACE uses Web services. The software runs on IBM's Health Integration Framework, which includes WebSphere and DB2, and provides application developers with a suite of tools including application adapters built on health care standards such as HIPAA EDI, HL7 and IHE integration profiles. This helps clients to use a single interface to integrate patient and clinical data.
“Florida Hospital is always looking for ways that we can improve patient safety and care by giving our caregivers more time with their patients and reducing time for administrative tasks," said Jayne Bassler, chief clinical informatics officer, Florida Hospital. "By integrating communications with our emergency equipment management system, we expect to improve positive outcomes while becoming more efficient and meeting our regulatory requirements.”
Avaya has teamed with IBM Global Services to jointly deploy Avaya ACE and the IBM Health Integration Framework for Florida Hospital, a 2,200-bed healthcare institution. This helps the company to integrate and automate communications for Emergency Equipment Compliance. To ensure it is fully functional at the moment of an urgent patient crisis, Joint Commission regulatory requirements mandate that emergency medical equipment such as defibrillators and airway intubators must be tested every 24 hours.
Recently, the company introduced new data products that are specifically designed to support the growing needs of today’s bandwidth-hungry video and unified communications applications. These products are designed to address the main challenge that enterprises face today -- how to “cost-effectively add the bandwidth needed to position them for growth.” The company’s newest product offerings include four solutions.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Marisa Torrieri
