A new integrated hospital information system has been installed at the Agia Sofia Athens Children's Hospital, based on INTRACOM's IntraHealth product suite. This newly developed system covers all the needs of a large Healthcare provider organization such as the Agia Sofia hospital, ranging from the patient's medical record (main functionality of IntraHealth), the administrative and financial information management (ERP) all the way to the management of laboratory examinations information.

Healthcare units are characterized by a high degree of complexity in terms of their business processes as well as by the commitment to provide high level clinical and hospitalization services. Each and every single one of the Agia Sofia clinics that collectively form the Agia Sofia hospital, were faced with the challenge to meet the demands for improved healthcare service provision, to control cash flow and to drastically reduce unnecessary medical drug administration. In order to meet these and other similar challenges, the business functions of the hospital had to be supported by an integrated solution that would encompass the functionality of an ERP, an HIS and an LIS.

The Agia Sofia Athens children hospital comprises of 36 clinics and 16 laboratories offering a capacity of c.a. 600 beds. It is the largest children's hospital in Greece and one of the biggest within the Balkan region while a total of 250 workstations will be connected to the integrated software system.

The offered ERP solution computerized and unified the basic administrative and financial functions of the hospital through the provision of the following modules: General Accounting, Warehouse, Procurement, Cost Accounting, Budgeting, Fixed Assets, and Accounts Receivable & Payable.

Apart from the Medical Information system and the Patient Administrative Information system, the Electronic medical record, the Pharmacy, the Admissions Office, the Patient's Counting house, the External Offices, Triage and Portal were also developed leading to the IntraHealth solution.

IntraHealth can be considered a true Integrated Information System, since Electronic medical and patient records, crucial administrative structures such as the Admission's Office and the Counting House, Hospital pharmacy and laboratories are being served in a cohesive and collective manner.

In order to provide a Laboratory Information System solution, INTRACOM collaborated with a company called CCS specializing in this type of software, thus integrating the product MediLAB LIMS into the complete solution. The LIS software "feeds" the electronic medical record of the IntraHealth application with the results of the laboratory analyses, which in turn (laboratory analyses) are being ordered through the HIS application in a clear and automatic manner.

In terms of the technical characteristics of the HIS application, by taking into account the functional organizational structure of the hospital, the user-friendliness that such a system should provide in combination with efficiency, upgradeability and easiness in terms of support provision, IntraHealth has been based on the following technology:

• N-tier, web based architecture
• HL7 compliance
• Compatibility with the majority of existing RDBMS' (Oracle, DB2, SQL)
• Java

Some of benefits arising from the productive operation of the aforementioned solution can be summarized as follows:

• Improved quality of services for the patients / citizens
• Amelioration of working environment for the clinical staff through an improved workflow, e.g. great reduction of bureaucracy
• Observation, design and control of financial processes and operations, e.g. more efficient resource allocation

The feedback received by the users from the initial operation of the system emphasizes on the ease of user-acceptance, reliability of the application and in particular of the financial modules, the adaptability of the software to the internal business processes and the provision of a holistic approach to the follow up of the clinical organization activities.