Press Room

St Vincent’s Hospital Group Improves Business Operations
by 30% using Defero Messaging Application Based on InterSystems Caché

Eton, UK – 11 February 2010 – InterSystems is pleased to announce that its Application Partner Grapevine Solutions has enabled St Vincent’s Hospital Group to reduce its Did Not Attend (DNA) rates by 30% using its Defero messaging application. Grapevine also received a ‘Best Use of IT’ commendation for Defero at the prestigious Irish Healthcare Awards 2009.

Defero (meaning ‘to communicate’ in Latin) is a messaging application that was developed on the InterSystems Caché^® high performance object database.  Defero was designed to make it very easy for users to send text messages to notify and remind patients of appointments, but it provides many more opportunities to communicate cost-effectively with patients, staff, and others.  St Vincent’s receives approximately 143,000 patients each year, and with an average DNA rate of 23%, this equates to just over 30,000 missed or rescheduled appointments.  Since Defero was introduced, the group’s DNA rate has been reduced by 30% (Dec 2009).  The HSE estimates the cost of each missed appointment to be €80, so in a full year the group expect missed appointments to be reduced to just over 20,000, bringing significant cost savings in the region of €750,000.

Like most other hospitals, St Vincent’s had previously overbooked appointment slots, for example allowing 50 to be made with the expectation that only 30 appointments would be met.  Now that the hospital uses Defero, more patients remember to attend their appointment and rescheduling is more efficient as patients reply earlier when they cannot attend.  This means that the hospital can better manage the ratio of new patients to returning patients, reduce over-booking, and optimise the use of their care provider and resource availability.  Over time the group expect this to have a positive effect on reducing patient waiting lists.

St Vincent’s already connects its healthcare applications using InterSystems Ensemble^®, a seamless platform for integration and the development of connected applications.  Therefore, the hospital’s integration service supplier BlueNote Limited created an Ensemble interface between the hospital’s Patient Administration System (PAS) and Defero.  This enables the users to access the PAS information on demand.  Other hospital services also use the Defero Contacts Module, for example the Nurse Bank uses it to support the scheduling of nearly 800 nurses.  St Vincent’s envisages using Defero for other communication purposes including within the hospital’s contingency plans during a major emergency.

“This is a good example of how developing applications with Caché enables our partners to innovate and answer the customer’s need.  Every hospital wants to improve patient services and make cost savings,” said Phil Birchall, Healthcare Business Development Director, InterSystems.  Birchall adds, “We are delighted that our partners, Grapevine and BlueNote, have used Caché and Ensemble to provide St Vincent’s with a versatile service with measurable business value.”

Terry Byrne, Grapevine Managing Director says, “Working with InterSystems we hope to build on the success we have had in St  Vincent’s and provide the same benefits and cost savings to other Irish and UK hospitals that have similar problems with missed appointments.”

Jim Brennan, BlueNote Managing Director said “InterSystems Ensemble provided an excellent framework to analyse, gather and transmit the Patient Booking details in a fast, secure and cost-effective way.  We are working to provide similar integration in other sites.”