“Without workflow, I think you’re going to find that healthcare organizations are just not going to be able to compete,” states CentraState’s Vice President and Chief Information Officer Indranil ‘Neal’ Ganguly. CentraState Healthcare System in central New Jersey, USA, is a 271-bed facility that implemented Soarian® Clinicals workflow management technology in 2007 in order to face the challenges related to delivering high-quality medical care. One of the benefits provided by workflow engines arises from its characteristic of alerting the appropriate person to take action and to follow a predefined workflow process. If the clinician does not take action, the system escalates the request further. Taking advantage of this benefit, CentraState has created 11 live workflows, including the Pressure Ulcer Prevention and the NPO (nothing by mouth) Workflow.

When an inpatient meets risk factors related to albumin levels, whether he or she is able to eat, the Pressure Ulcer Prevention Workflow notifies nurses to put the patient in a bed with a pressure-relieving mattress. Every two hours, the workflow notifies the appropriate nurse to turn the patient. CentraState’s Chief Nursing Officer Linda Geisler, RN, credits the workflow, along with training sessions for staff, with keeping the nosocomial pressure ulcer rate at CentraState well below the benchmark rate set by the American Nurses Association National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. The most recent data from CentraState shows a nosocomial pressure ulcer rate of 1.86 percent. “This is all automatic, and that’s the beauty of it,” says Geisler. “It’s not an extra task – it’s just reminding nurses when they need to take action.”

Another recently implemented workflow provides alerts to the nurses when patients are NPO because of pending radiology exams. Geisler says hundreds of patients a week are NPO, and before the workflow was implemented, staff would, on occasion, mistakenly give these patients food trays. The result was that these patients would need to have their tests delayed for a day – disrupting the radiology schedule and incurring costs. Geisler estimates that the workflow will save CentraState US$31,000 per year. Besides these financial benefits, Soarian Clinicals has enabled improvements in the quality of patient care offered at CentraState, reflected, for instance, in the decrease of nosocomial pressure ulcer rate.