Caregivers at San Diego-based Fresenius Medical Care Extracorporeal Alliance are using PDAs to collect and transmit dialysis data. The provider organization, a division of Fresenius Medical Care North America, offers dialysis and other clinical services in hospitals across the United States.
In 1998, the company enlisted the services of Interactive Business Systems Inc., an Oak Brook, Ill.-based consulting firm, to automate dialysis data collection and transmission. Prior to the agreement, caregivers at Fresenius had been collecting dialysis services data on paper. When it came time for the company to produce quarterly service reports for its hospital constituents, employees had to search through mounds of paper to find enough information to report Continuous Quality Improvement data to the client, says Mary Jo Davis, director of acute business development for the company's dialysis services division.
"For our 40 dialysis programs, it used to take us two to three days to find data and get it into a spreadsheet," she says. "It was a manual process, so we'd only end up providing our hospitals with about 15% of their actual data."
The consulting firm designed a PDA-based application for Fresenius that enabled caregivers to collect dialysis information at a patient's bedside, then synch the data to the company's database server over a phone line at their homes. Caregivers are using various models of PDAs from palmOne, Milpitas, Calif., for the initiative.
Caregivers also can enter detailed information into the application, such as the specific hospital they worked at and the number of hours they were there. Having this information in the integrated database has made it easier for the company to find hospital-specific data that it needs for quarterly reports. It also helps the company more easily find the information it needs to produce more accurate and timely payroll for its caregivers, Davis says.
"All of our caregivers are mobile, so it seemed like enabling them to use PDAs would be most optimal," she adds. "Now we can easily find the information we need to give our hospitals 100% of their CQI data. We also can extract data that we can use to help renegotiate our services. We now can get down to the detail of what's going on at each hospital by using PDAs for data reporting."
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