REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 26, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the Menninger Clinic, a leading international psychiatric hospital in Houston, has selected Microsoft® technologies to develop a centralized clinical information system used to help maintain hospital records, meet compliance regulations and cut overall hospital costs.
Menninger is a 135-bed hospital that accommodates patients whose treatments range from six weeks to four months, with each phase of treatment requiring one or more paper-based forms. Menninger’s mental health software system was not meeting the hospital’s interdisciplinary treatment and record-keeping needs, creating excessive paper documentation and draining valuable staff hours.
Menninger turned to Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Insource Technology Corp., and was able to consolidate six patient applications into one easy-to-use system powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 (MOSS) and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007.
“Microsoft SharePoint has been invaluable to us, as the application we were working with was becoming too complicated to maintain with one full-time employee and two consultants dedicated to its maintenance,” said Terry Janis, director of Information Technology at Menninger. “Now we can devote those funds to other projects that contribute to higher-quality patient care — all while fulfilling HIPAA requirements.”
Since deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, the Menninger Clinic has reduced time-consuming paperwork by up to 25 percent, freeing valuable hours each week that staff members can spend on patient-focused activities and quality-of-care priorities. The staff also was able to eliminate licensing and maintenance fees from the older system (estimated at $30,000 per year), and to significantly cut back on the developer effort needed to create, maintain, support and enhance medical forms — an estimated savings of $30,000 per year. In addition, Menninger avoided a one-time cost of $20,000 for data conversion — leading to a total annual savings of $80,000.
Perhaps more important than the cost savings, the new MOSS-based system also allows for tighter internal controls and improved compliance with HIPAA privacy rules, resulting in a smooth transition to an integrated information system.
“Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers Menninger the ability to easily store, manage and retrieve patient demographic information and clinical documentation,” said Chris Sullivan, Healthcare Provider Solutions Director of the U.S. Healthcare and Life Sciences Group at Microsoft. “A normalized relational database design for this application might require dozens of tables. The document-centric design of Menninger’s system uses SharePoint Server 2007 to reduce this to a handful of lists and document libraries.”
About Menninger Clinic
The Menninger Clinic is a 135-bed psychiatric center for patient care, research and professional training in Houston, Texas, with a staff of 400. Since 1925, Menninger has provided treatment for more than 250,000 patients from around the world.
About Microsoft in Healthcare and Life Sciences
Microsoft provides standards-based products and technology to help the healthcare and life sciences industries break down information barriers between the disparate IT environments across pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, physicians and healthcare professionals, provider organizations, government and private-sector employers, health insurers, and consumers. Microsoft’s vision for knowledge-driven health utilizes the company’s cutting-edge technology to help these groups integrate their systems, dramatically enhance collaboration, and increase information sharing and learning — ultimately resulting in the ability to deliver high-quality products and services to patients and consumers worldwide. More information about Microsoft in Healthcare and Life Sciences can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/healthcare.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
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