Client

Artromick

Products Used:

Flex 2.0 (advance release beta)

Challenge

For 35 years, Artromick International has been the market leader in providing solutions that enable both pharmacy and facility to effectively manage the medication administration process. Artromick saw an opportunity to change the industry by bringing the marketplace an eMar (Electronic Medication Administration Record) that would replace a paper based medication and personal care system with a web-enabled solution.

In order to appeal to a change-resistant old guard of doctors and nurses used to working in a paper-based world, the eMar needed to be intuitive and easy enough to quickly train new operators in an industry with high nurse turnover. It also had to engage technology to reduce errors common with the existing paper and human-to-human processes, and yet not lose the personal touch aspect of patient care. That meant that the end result needed to be deployed through simplistic charts and tables with bar code reading and touch screen functionality.

Behind the scenes, the development technology used to build the eMar required stability and reliability, and above all else, the ability to handle the mission critical nature of dealing with the disbursement of medication and treatments to long term care residents across the country. If the technology could not be delivered as advertised, it literally meant life and death in this situation.

Lastly, in order to gain the most benefit from the system, the eMar needed to be built from conception to commercial release in a short nine months.

Purpose of the Build:

Artromick engaged Adobe services partner, Twin Technologies, to design, develop, test and deliver the commercial eMar. After carefully examining the options, Twin Techs used Adobe Flex 2.0 for both prototyping and development because the platform provided an ability to quickly refine the design with full traceability to deliver the solution in a very quick time. In addition to speeding the development process, Flex also was the only option that enabled a user-friendly GUI that has been so widely embraced by the doctors and nurses that they have termed it a "medication video game."

The final eMar build promises millisecond response time to touch screen interactions and a GUI which houses the entire application and all of potential treatment scenarios within 3 clicks. The reliability of Flex ensures that the Artromick eMar will be highly available 24/7/365.

Reports of Success Since Launch:

eMar usage acceptance has been nearly unanimous in early commercial roll-outs and is showing significant efficiency gains by the doctors and nurses; so much so that the extra time once spent logging charts and medication/treatment tracking pre-eMar is now being spent with important human-to-human interactions. The Artromick eMar featuring Flex captures preferences of each individual patient so that shift changes are now seamless to the resident, ensuring optimal care and patient happiness.

The eMar is so intuitive to use that nurses can pick it up in as quickly as 5 minutes and have the ability to easily train one another with new software releases or personnel changes.

Additional Details:

Twin Techs was presented with the Artromick project in April 2006, delivered an early beta by September and a commercial release in November.