Dedalus Care-Covering the Continuum of Care
By Nilesh Jain
Healthcare information technology will play a key role in helping healthcare organisations to overcome multifaceted operational challenges while addressing the need to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. Dedalus is helping to address these challenges and needs through the introduction of Dedalus Care which embodies a holistic approach, ensuring support for the entire patient lifespan, covering the entire continuum of care and integrating with every facet of a healthcare organisation.
Healthcare organisations worldwide are grappling with an array of challenges. The pressures of growing and aging populations are straining already limited resources. While healthcare technology advances rapidly, financial constraints are hindering its swift implementation. Empowered patients are increasingly demanding higher quality care, and clinician burnout is on the rise due to overwhelming workloads. Innovative
models like hospitals ‘without walls’ are emerging, redefining and extending care delivery beyond traditional settings. In the developing world, a lack of healthcare access remains a significant issue. Adapting to these challenges requires collaborative and innovative solutions from the entire healthcare ecosystem.
Improving effectiveness and efficiency in operations is paramount for healthcare advancement. It is equally vital to elevate the quality of services delivered, with a growing emphasis on personalisation. Being faster in the execution of strategic plans and
enhancing integration across healthcare services are crucial goals. There is a push to extend the reach and accessibility of services offered. The success of the healthcare sector depends on the ability to attract and retain high-calibre professionals. Embracing emerging digital technologies fosters innovation, while a commitment to sustainability is essential in delivering healthcare services.
In addition to the global challenges and needs described above, healthcare organisations in South East Asia have to deal with other unique circumstances. With growing economies and maturing infrastructure, there is a need to improve the quality of healthcare while dealing with expanding volumes. This can be done by adopting world-class standard pathways and practices, but it takes a lot of time and human resource to create and mature them.
Unlike in Europe where most healthcare is delivered through public institutions, private institutions are a faster-growing healthcare delivery sector in South East Asia. This is accompanied by an emerging healthcare insurance sector which is adopting practices and technologies already established in the West. Billing and revenue cycle management
is at the heart of ensuring the continuing commercial viability of these private healthcare institutions. At the same time, public institutions remain a major source of healthcare delivery in South East Asia. They too require flexible billing systems as well as sophisticated means of capturing healthcare utilisation to assist with planning for short-term capacity demands and devising long-term healthcare policy initiatives. Dedalus is helping to address these challenges and needs through the introduction of Dedalus Care in South East Asia (and other parts of the globe). Dedalus Care is a comprehensive solution which seamlessly integrates every facet of a healthcare organisation. It encapsulates everything from primary to tertiary care, revenue cycle management
to advanced analytics, and virtual care to home care. Dedalus Care is the embodiment of a holistic approach, ensuring support for the entire patient lifespan, and covering the entire continuum of care.
Dedalus Care is underpinned by an award winning electronic medical record and patient administration system which removes the barriers between care settings and offers an integrated and patient-centric system to share patient clinical and administrative information for a continuum of care within and between healthcare organisations. With over 30 years of evolution, the system is currently in its fourth generation embedding modern technologies and capabilities. It is in use at nearly 150 hospitals of varying sizes across multiple countries, ranging from small hospitals to large region-wide deployments, and it covers patient records for more than one-fifth of the population across Iberia (Spain,Portugal and Andorra).
The other key component of Dedalus Care is a healthcare-focused enterprise resource planning system supporting billing, claims handling, cash management and revenue cycle management; procurement, warehousing and pharmacy; asset management, tracking and geo-location; and finance administration and accounting. It is fully integrated with the electronic medical record and patient administration system, and offers highly configurable workflows to accommodate future needs as well as a modular architecture to enable phased rollout. Many healthcare organisations around the world are using the pharmacy component in conjunction with electronic prescribing and medication administration from their electronic medical record to improve the safety, quality and efficiency of hospital medication management.
Dedalus Care is a complete hospital information system through provision of key departmental systems and state-of-the-art standards-based interoperability. Dedalus Care can be complemented with optional modules to cover pre-hospital and emergency care (including ambulance and other emergency transport), telehealth (remote consultations and multidisciplinary team meetings), kitchen management, document management, and business intelligence (covering a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with dashboards to monitor them) – each of these are already proven in various healthcare settings and providing benefits to patients and clinicians.
Dedalus Care has a user-friendly web-based user interface which works on all modern web browsers and hence facilitates easy end-user deployment and training, along with a clinician mobile application. Dedalus Care is designed for rapid template-driven
deployment, strong user satisfaction and optimised total cost of ownership. Dedalus Care is flexible and can be easily and quickly adapted to local healthcare regulations and organisational models. Dedalus Care’s large customer base enables Dedalus to
offer clinical and administrative international standard workflows to help customers on their journey to delivering high-quality cost-effective healthcare. Dedalus Care is targeted to work on public cloud infrastructure, especially Amazon Web Services, but
can equally work on other public or private cloud infrastructure as well as through localised on-premise deployment.
Dedalus Care can bring a number of benefits to healthcare organisations in South East Asia. It supports hospital care and extended beyond-hospital services. It enhances the productivity of healthcare providers by removing administrative burdens linked to repeated manual input. It cuts expenses by automating information transfer from clinical to financial and inventory management applications via adaptable business process models. It guarantees precision and expedites cost recovery. It frees up healthcare professionals to concentrate on patient care. It facilitates improved decision-making through immediate access to more precise data across clinical, financial, and supply chain systems. It offers the capacity to refine business processes. It lowers the
overall cost of ownership by diminishing implementation duration and expenses and using cost-efficient technologies.
Dedalus is a global health software company and one of the largest in the world. Working across the whole continuum of care and offering open standards-based solutions, Dedalus helps healthcare organisations to deliver new models of care. The benefit of Dedalus’ approach is enabling the delivery of better healthcare outcomes. Dedalus has over 40 years of experience of delivering healthcare software and services to over 6300 healthcare organisations and 5700 labs and diagnostic centres worldwide. Dedalus software is used widely across the world, managing each year more than 3 billion diagnostic results, serving a population of over 540 million, with 28 million inpatient and 35 million emergency admissions, and over 120 million citizens in primary care.
Today, Dedalus employs more than 6600 highly skilled qualified people; it has the largest software R&D team in the industry in Europe representing 38% of the overall workforce. Dedalus’ passion and mission, expressed in its software-based solutions,
is to enable healthcare professionals to build and share clinical knowledge.
Biosketch – Dr Nilesh Jain is the Global Product Manager for Dedalus Care. He has
previously been the Asia, Middle East and Africa Lead for Health Care Information
Systems, and also has been Product Manager for Care Suite Personas, Lorenzo and
Premiere Synergy. He has over 25 years of experience in Healthcare IT across suppliers, healthcare organisations, academia and international standards. His specific areas of
expertise in healthcare informatics include electronic patient records, clinical terminology, clinical decision support, clinical documentation, structured data entry, artificial intelligence, interoperability and healthcare information standards. Nilesh has a PhD in Computer Science and Medical Informatics from Washington University in St Louis,
USA and a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay, India.