Intersystem’s TrakCare™ software is a Web-based, patient-centric healthcare information system used by leading healthcare organizations around the world. It is comprised of a comprehensive portfolio of application modules, including patient.

Healthcare organizations in 25 countries are making breakthroughs in patient care with TrakCare, a unified healthcare information system that enables coordinated care within a hospital or across care settings throughout a region — facilitating a seamless patient journey.

Emergency Management

It’s a particularly busy night in the Emergency department. How do you identify who has been seen and who hasn’t? Or what grade of triage has been assigned? Or how long an individual patient has been waiting? Or what rooms are available? How does a clinician keep track of a patient’s movements and know whether he’s been sent for X-rays yet?

Readily accessible information is critical in this environment, but it has to be uncluttered, with skillful use of colors and icons to alert where necessary, but not distract. More important, the information must be dynamically updated as events occur, allowing clinicians to make fast assessments.

The TrakCare Emergency Management module is a comprehensive tool that can be integrated with the Inpatient and Outpatient modules or used as a stand-alone application. It handles the triaging and treatment of patients and is designed to perform the registration, movement, and capture of care interventions during emergency attendance. The Emergency Management module facilitates the coordination and efficient management of the emergency rooms, resources, and clinical staff and provides clinical and nonclinical teams with clinical, location, administration, and billing functionality – where all users have access to the data in real time.

As the Emergency Management application is fully integrated with other TrakCare modules, pre-assessment, clinic attendances, past emergency attendances, and past admissions data can be available for viewing in the patient’s electronic record. For any event, the patient’s demographic; admission, clinical, and billing processes are linked and allow for the real-time clinical and account management of the patient.

Core functions of Emergency Management include:

Registration allows the user to create a new patient record or search for an existing patient who has been registered into the TrakCare module.
Triage allows healthcare professionals to distinguish the most critically urgent patients from less urgent cases, so care delivery is provided in the most effective and efficient manner. The Triage feature allows the user to enter a patient’s triage details including the triage date, time, and category; this will determine each emergency patient’s priority, with a specific color assigned to each triage category.
Clinician records healthcare professionals who actively participated in the delivery of care for a patient. A history of healthcare professional activity is maintained.
Electronic Patient Record captures the continuum of clinical and administrative information about the patient. It contains patient demographics, medical history, previous admission information, previous surgical information, and obstetric history. The medical history contains allergies, disease history, family
History, and social history. The EPR provides a visual display of all information that has been collected. It can also be extended to include orders and results from lab and radiology departments, prescribing, or the generation of a discharge summary for a specific episode or linked episodes.
Move records a patient’s movement to a temporary location (e.g., the Radiology department).
Bed Requests is used if an emergency patient requires admission as an inpatient to a ward. The request can be recorded and transmitted to the Bed Manager. Allocation of a ward and bed by the Bed Manager will:
1. Notify the Emergency department that it may prepare to discharge the patient.
2. Display the patient as “pending admission from Emergency department” on the ward list of the ward the patient has been assigned to, thus alerting the staff of a pending Emergency department patient transfer/admission.
3. Contain available patient data so re-keying of information is eliminated.
Chart Requests accommodates the requesting and tracking of patient charts. These documents can include the patient’s medical records, dental charts, psychiatric records, and radiology films. Requests for records can be triggered automatically or manually.
Discharge allows discharge details to be recorded against a patient. Assigning a discharge date and time will automatically remove the patient from the Emergency Floor Plan and patient list.
Letters enables the facility to produce patient correspondence. The format of letters is defined by the client; InterSystems can provide an initial set of templates. A history of correspondence showing creation details and reprint information, and the ability to view sent documents are also available.
Patient Labels/Registration Forms
Mass Disaster provides automated bulk registration to support mass disasters where the only known information is the estimated number of patients coming to the Emergency department at the hospital. It permits clinicians to proceed with the care of the patient.
Billing Additional Features and Benefits
Floor Plans/Map provides a graphical display of the waiting room, cubicles, and procedure rooms within the Emergency department. At a glance, a user can see where patients are located, along with selected patient information. Static and interactive icons are also available in the Emergency Floor Plan.
Scan Documents allows the user to associate a scanned document type to a particular patient. For example, a picture of an injury sustained from an accident can be scanned and assigned to a specific emergency visit/episode.
Mobile Devices, available in the Community and Inpatient modules, is also available in the Emergency Management module to address the challenges of recording information at the point of care.
Multiview allows users to search for admissions within a given date range for a location or location type.
Billing allows billing of Emergency department attendances and services. The Patient Billing product sheet describes this functionality in more detail.

Case Study

The NHS Scotland Patient Management System program for hospitals gives authorized users immediate access to better clinical and administration information from one standard healthcare information system. It is a strategic part of the Scottish Government’s e-health transformation to empower a 21st century Scottish NHS to provide effective, fair, and affordable care.