Garfield County Hospital District and Echospace announce partnership
Garfield County Hospital District and Echospace partner to create a quality assurance software tool designed to upgrade practices in hospitals. Q-DASH is HIPAA compliant and allows a hospital administrator to run their hospital much more efficiently.
(PRWEB) October 22, 2003
PRESS RELEASE
Josh Levell – Sales Executive– 425.697.4991 x107 – josh@echospace. com
Garfield County Hospital District and Echospace announce partnership
Portal aims to improve quality and extend community outreach
POMEROY, Washington—8 September 2003—Echospace, Inc. and the Garfield County Hospital District (GCHD) announced their partnership agreement this month. The partnership aims to extend GCHD’s community outreach programs through a number of web-based initiatives, the first of which is based on Echospace’s SinglePage™ Presentation Server (SPPS), an information portal.
“We were looking for a user-friendly reporting tool for all our existing data,” said Andrew Craigie, hospital administrator for Garfield County Memorial Hospital. “And we wanted to streamline entry of new data.” Craigie found that the Echospace SPPS, with its standard portlet suite and Echospace’s custom portlet development, met these needs.
Q-DASH, or Quality Data Analysis System for Hospitals, uses the SPPS to allow hospital employees, patients, and community members to interact with the hospital through a web-based interface thatÂ’s tailored for their needs. For example, patients can answer an exit interview about the quality of their care, hospital cleanliness, etc., while employees can complete a variety of hospital forms online, replacing their paper-based counterparts and saving time. These and other forms and surveys are created by hospital administrators through an intuitive Q-DASH web site that requires no programming or HTML knowledge on the part of its users. The systemÂ’s role-based permissions model and secure connection brings full HIPAA compliance.
Data from all aspects of a healthcare facility is monitored and analyzed by administrators through portlets, mini-applications embedded into an information portal. Each portlet provides a customized real-time view (including graphs) of some subset of hospital data, such as birthrates, staffing levels, or a variety of patient metrics. “Q-DASH brings together the information I need to manage my hospital,” Craigie said.
“Q-DASH is an exciting product for the healthcare industry,” said Chad Estes, Director of Engineering at Echospace, “and we’re pleased to work with Garfield County and the Washington Health Foundation in further developing it.” The Washington Health Foundation provided funding for the project and the Critical Access Hospital Quality Network encouraged the development of Q-DASH. Other initiatives from the partnership include expanding the Q-DASH system to other hospitals in eastern Washington state and expanding its capabilities to include patient monitoring and charting.
ABOUT ECHOSPACE – Echospace was founded in 1999 to design an efficient framework for building high performance Web applications at considerably less cost. Today, Echospace focuses on architecting solutions for the web application and corporate information portal marketplaces. Learn more about our customer-centric methodology at www. echospace. com.
ABOUT GCHD – Garfield County Hospital District provides healthcare services to the rural eastern Washington community of Pomeroy. The public hospital district serves the community with a critical-access hospital, drop-in medical clinic, long-term care facility, and Garfield County’s only licensed childcare center. Garfield County Memorial Hospital has the distinction of being designated the first Critical Access Hospital in Washington state and is very active in developing innovative approaches to quality in rural healthcare.
Echospace, SinglePage, SPPS and Q-DASH are trademarks of Echospace, Inc.
