King Abdullah University Hospital Is Jordan’s first fully computerized hospital

Digital transformation is sweeping across almost every industry, including healthcare. One hospital that recently embarked on its digital transformation journey is King Abdullah University Hospital, one of the largest in Jordan. With help from DXC Technology, the hospital has designed, installed and implemented a state-of-the-art healthcare information system that provides end-to-end information while helping control costs and improve patient care.

King Abdullah University Hospital (KAUH) serves nearly 1 million local residents. As part of its mission to be a leading healthcare facility, it provides advanced patient services from several locations. It’s also a teaching hospital affiliated with the Jordan University of Science and Technology.

While KAUH strives to have the best possible technologies and devices, its legacy healthcare information system had multiple technical issues and left many users within the hospital dissatisfied.

To improve this situation, KAUH chose DXC to help implement a health information system that provided secure, end-to-end information services. These services would include data analysis and various administrative functions.

DXC first helped KAUH develop a new IT infrastructure. Then the two partners implemented the healthcare information system and integrated the hospital’s various services. “We rely on DXC completely to provide our electronic services,” says Eng Anas Matalka, the hospital’s IT director.

State of the art information

Among the project’s main initiatives was a computerized medical file containing complete details on all the hospital’s patients. This information needed to be available, easily and quickly, to the hospital’s physicians and other healthcare practitioners. KAUH administrators knew that having fast and accurate access to this kind of information would be critical, especially in intensive care, where fast decisions can literally become matters of life and death. Yet the system would also need to keep all patient information strictly private and highly secure.

“You need the help of reliable companies,” says Dr. Ibrahim Al Faouri, the hospital’s chief nursing officer and head of quality, “because you need to deal with programming, and both advanced and developed solutions.”

All that has helped the hospital’s departments and functions. On the nursing side, the new system helps keep patient data precise and accredited. On the quality side, it helps maintain data accuracy. The system also helps KAUH’s physicians write accurate prescriptions by tracking the availability of medications in the hospital’s pharmacy. And for administrators, the system has helped improve the speed with which appointments are scheduled and tracked. This system has also helped KAUH qualify for Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC), which validates the skills of information-security professionals.

“It’s a fast and comprehensive system,” says Dr. Suleiman Momany, KAUH’s chief medical officer and an internal, chest, intensive-care and pathology specialist. “It provides all the medical services we need, and without any restrictions.”

“We’re proud of our longstanding and long- lasting partnership with DXC,” says Prof. Ismail Matalka, the hospital’s chief executive officer (CEO). “We’re working together to continuously improve and upgrade our health information system.”

Training gains

However, change is rarely easy, and some of the hospital’s staff initially resisted using the new healthcare information system. To help overcome this resistance and increase usage, DXC has provided continuous staff training.

This training has delivered other benefits, too. Some staff members have found that the training opens new opportunities for them, both within the hospital and at other healthcare centers in Jordan and abroad. Training provided by DXC has also helped the hospital’s technical and logistics teams cope with the new and updated devices.

As part of the work, DXC helped KAUH apply best practices not only with the new healthcare information system, but also throughout the hospital. This has improved overall ease and speed, in part by providing more comfort to the patients and creating a greater sense of trust. Smart usage of the system has lowered costs for the hospital, patients and insurers alike, even as it helps increase the number of patient visits. That, in turn, has increased the hospital’s income.

“We’re proud of our longstanding and long-lasting partnership with DXC,” says Prof. Ismail Matalka, the hospital’s chief executive officer (CEO). “We’re working together to continuously improve and upgrade our health information system.”

Going paperless

The improvements Prof. Matalka refers to include KAUH’s new status as Jordan’s first fully computerized and paperless hospital. This advance has simplified both the recording of patient information and the generation of reports based on that data. “Patient information and medical procedures are accurate, as they are controlled by the system,” says Dr. Khaldoon Bashaireh, the hospital’s deputy CEO.

KAUH now plans to transform itself into a “smart hospital” by connecting all devices used internally to the medical information system. One important goal of this effort will be to dramatically reduce the number of errors introduced during information entry, which was formerly done by hand.

The hospital also hopes to take advantage of DXC’s long experience helping other customers in healthcare. Together, DXC and KAUH are readying several new IT projects, including the creation of mobile apps that will be used by both patients and staff. As Dr. Al Faouri says, “We trust DXC to always get the latest technology.”