DSS Announces Integration of SMART Alerts into VistA GUI

Tracking system notifies providers of abnormal test results to enhance care delivery for female veterans, improve workflow for providers

JUNO BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Document Storage Systems, Inc. (DSS), the leading provider of VistA-based software development and support, today announced its successful integration of SMART Alerts into the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) Version 31 to enhance patient care for female veterans and workflow for providers. The SMART Alerts project was initiated in response to The Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards and the Women Veterans Health Strategic Health Care Group’s innovation project for an alert system to monitor and track normal and abnormal test results and breast cancer screenings for female veterans.

The Health Informatics Specialist (HIS) configurable system sends real-time alerts notifying providers when patients have abnormal test results, ensuring proper care delivery through treatment and follow-up. Once a user processes a SMART Alert, it takes them immediately to the note tab in CPRS, providing them with the option to default the note, or add an addendum to an existing note, and accurately document patient care plans.

“With the VA’s focus on providing high-quality healthcare for female veterans through the Women’s Health Initiatives and projects like the VAi2 Maternity Tracker, ensuring robust communication in all stages of the care process is a top priority,” said Mark Byers, CEO and president of DSS. “Our experience with CPRS, VistA and vxVistA makes us prime candidates to develop and implement note alert and tracking capabilities for this project. We are very excited to help enhance patient safety and outcomes, as it will also lead to improved overall care delivery for the growing female veteran population.”

As a result of full integration with CPRS, providers will leverage SMART Alerts to improve workflow to thoroughly and efficiently manage patient cases. Additional benefits of SMART Alerts include:

• Integrating with the Converged Registry Solution and documents any new or changed processes to support aggregate outcomes reporting from repository data;
• Offering additional reporting and querying capabilities to identify who has received abnormal diagnostic test results and what follow up services were provided;
• Improving documentation consistency as each alert is configured to use a reminder dialog with customizable display notifications at least once per day to meet provider needs;
• Providing accountability as an alert is not dismissed until the provider consciously indicates that the reminder dialog has been completed; and
• Making it easier for providers to distinguish relevant notifications from non-relevant and administrative notifications, decreasing information overload and alert fatigue.

The request for a tracking system was issued in January 2012, and DSS was selected to provide the development, testing and implementation. The entire project was completed in seven months and met time and budget guidelines, while also providing additional functionality, including configuration for any lab or radiology test, automatic reminders without logging into the system and links to medications and orders for better analytics and patient care.

Product testing took place in DSS’ sandbox test environment and has successfully concluded. DSS will continue to provide access to the test environment before beta testing occurs.

About Document Storage Systems, Inc. (DSS, Inc.)

DSS is a leading health information technology (HIT) software development and systems integration company. For more than 20 years, healthcare organizations have benefited from our technical and service integration expertise. DSS has extensive experience working with federal, private and public healthcare facilities to modernize their legacy systems and to improve efficiencies for clinical and administrative users. DSS is a member of the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) organization and released its own open source EHR in 2009, vxVistA, which takes the most reliable and widely used open source EHR in the country to a new level to meet the needs of hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities and physician practices. To further foster the adoption of open source in healthcare organizations, DSS is a founder and supporter of a community-driven, collaboration environment website, The VistA Extension Hub (www.ThevxHub.org), which acts as a forum for discussion and best practices among VistA users. For more information about DSS, visit www.dssinc.com.

Contact

For DSS
Jessica Beard, 770-576-2575
[email protected]