Case Studies

Siemens Soarian Implementations

For hospitals that need a solution to improve productivity, optimize workflow and streamline tasks for years to come, Soarian Clinicals is designed to provide a complete clinical system with the patient as the main focus. With a closed-loop design and utilizing push technology, Soarian Clinicals focuses on the processes surrounding the patient experience. Unlike other such solutions from other vendors, however, Siemens is planning to pull each of its modules, devices and abilities into one IT system location and one view, making it the most inclusive patient record system ever assembled. Such a design would be the first time a clinical system includes all the information for the entire patient picture – history of tests, medications, test images and even genetic information – in just one system. Essentially, Soarian Clinicals is a platform for future enhancements available only through Siemens.

Once a hospital considers moving to the new Siemens Soarian Clinicals platform, there are a number of steps that need to be taken to ensure proper implementation. First and foremost, the hospital must define realistic goals for the implementation. This involves having an awareness and assessment of the current state of the system and creating a project timeline that has the appropriate resources to meet the future state. Most hospitals do not take into account the amount of resources needed to support their current legacy system while building the new system. Such an implementation greatly affects the hospital’s staff because it requires frequent clinician, physician, and IT input through meetings, testing and other related tasks and takes all involved away from their everyday duties within the organization.

Before hospitals can define a future state for their implementation of Soarian Clinicals, they need to examine what is in their previous system. This is especially true when setting up Common Clinicals, which encompasses online orders, and Clinical Access, which encompasses results. This sometimes repetitive process involves the analysis of legacy HIS data, where everything in the old legacy HIS system must be analyzed to decide which data will be moved to Soarian Clinicals. Data that has become obsolete or is no longer usable can be removed from the system, thereby preventing the migration of non-pertinent data. This analysis, which can take months because of all the various types of data, is complete and in-depth. This “cleaning” process should take place at every level of the implementation, although different items will be analyzed.

After the analysis of legacy HIS data, hospitals must take on the setup of the new Soarian Clinicals system, which can be extremely labor intensive. Most of this setup process is left to the hospital itself. There is no tool that will automatically take all of the items in the old HIS system and save them into Soarian Clinicals, so every legacy HIS data item must be entered manually into the upload tool provided by Siemens or entered directly into the new system.

With the implementation of Clinical Access and Common Clinicals, new interfaces need to be developed to relay the orders to and results from the ancillary system. The hospital is expected to build these interfaces. For online orders, order detail screens must be created to collect the correct order detail. There are coding requirements in the background that state how the name or order is supposed to display in the patient record along with restrictions on when and how an order should be placed. Order sets must be created to facilitate quick order entry, and order session and notification printing must also be created and routed to the appropriate department for notification of the order.

As the new Soarian Clinicals system is being built, the hospital’s clinical work processes must be correctly analyzed. This clinical transformation serves two purposes critical to a successful Soarian implementation. First, it ensures that those implementing the system understand the needs of the end-users and thusly develop the system to work with their process, not against it. Second, it provides a step to make sure the current processes are the most efficient ones possible, thereby resulting in maximum return on investment (ROI) and user acceptance. The amount of clinical transformation that has to occur with a new system is often overlooked. If the hospital’s processes are flawed, putting in a new system will highlight those flaws. Building the system with the most efficient processes is usually the difference between a successful and failed implementation.

The implementation of Clinical Team includes clinical documentation, which essentially is comprised of assessments. Although Siemens will typically assist with the creation of a couple parts of an assessment to teach a hospital, each assessment has to be created by the hospital. This provides an opportune time for the hospital to analyze its processes, standardize assessment fields and validate that the corresponding technology compliment the clinical workflow instead of disrupting it.

Clinical Physician Order Entry (CPOE), similar to online order entry but from the perspective of a physician, includes the building of complex medication order entry pathways and physician order sets. An integral part of CPOE is process redesign, which can be faced with much opposition from the physicians because it can initially create the perception of increased time requirements for patient care. The implementation team has to work closely with the physicians in the process redesign to implement and deploy the CPOE in a way the physicians can accept.

An important part of the Soarian Clinicals conversion involves the implementation of Workflows. Workflows is the reason many hospitals implement Soarian as it provides a tremendous tool to turn the hospital’s IT system from reactive to proactive. However, it typically is the last facet examined by hospitals even though it is the one part of the process that can truly provide a quick ROI. Few people in today’s market have the level and mix of technical and clinical experience to develop workflows. These workflows are typically complex and thus labor intensive, so deploying three to five new workflows a year is considered great progress. The process requires the analysis of those who understand the functionality of the processes at the hospital, and how the data is stored in the system.

Consultants at Stoltenberg work hand in hand with the hospital staff to fill in necessary gaps in the implementation by working with them to manage, advice, teach and build. Stoltenberg Consulting has the expertise and experience to serve a wide range of roles in a Soarian Clinicals implementation providing expert knowledge throughout the project. This includes current state assessment, future state planning, project management, conversion, building, clinical transformation, workflow development, training and implementation for a smooth and successful project. They absorb the workload usually placed on the hospital and serve as a trusted advisor to ensure the time, skills and resources necessary for a successful, streamlined implementation are in place. Stoltenberg helps to diminish risk and increases ROI providing hospitals long term benefits from their Soarian Clinicals system. Currently, Stoltenberg is the only consulting service used by Siemens for Soarian Clinicals implementations.