HEALTH

TORONTO -- SAND Technology has chosen e-Health 2003, a joint conference sponsored by COACH: Canada's Health Informatics Association and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), as the venue to announce its new high-performance Healthcare Analytic Server. The product is designed to make the information contained in electronic medical records more easily and inexpensively available to the full health care community, including researchers and administrators, with minimal need for involvement by IT resources. "Better, more accessible patient information makes for better, less expensive healthcare," said SAND Executive Vice President Jerry Shattner. "The core of this initiative is the SAND(TM) Analytic Server, a technology that has been instrumental in building customer database analysis systems for companies in the telecommunications and financial services sectors. With the Healthcare Analytic Server, we have taken those commercial best practices and adapted them to the healthcare market in a way that will make critical information more accessible to caregivers, medical researchers and administrators, while providing a high level of privacy protection for the patient." The SAND(TM) Healthcare Analytic Server includes: * An automated process to manage the extraction and transformation of data from medical systems * A specialized data model to translate complex health data into information that is meaningful to the different sectors of the healthcare organization * A patient privacy protection component based on the 3DES encryption standard * A SNOMED batch encoder used to integrate semi-structured (freetext) medical information, for example medical notes * User-friendly report generation and ad hoc query interfaces * A data segmentation tool for providing precise extracted data samples to researchers. The system is modular, providing entry capabilities for institutions at any stage of operational automation. It can be configured to suit different departmental functions: The SAND Discharge Record Analytic Server enables analytics on a healthcare organization's discharge database. This solution can be quickly implemented for organizations of any size, and delivers a 360-degree view of discharge information to a variety of departments, including administration, professional services, health record managers, and researchers. The SAND Laboratory Analytic Server combines laboratory data with discharge record data. The result can be coupled with disease and/or medical procedure data to enable a better understanding of healthcare practices or to support health demographic studies. The SAND Clinical Analytic Server integrates the Electronic Patient Record into the analytic platform. For healthcare organizations that have implemented an Electronic Patient Record system, this enables analysis of all aspects of a clinical pathway and can be used to monitor and analyze clinical practices as well as to track organizational efficiency "The SAND(TM) Healthcare Analytic Server was originally developed for the Centre de Recherche Clinique at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CRC-CHUS) in Quebec, where a full Electronic Patient Record system is available with twelve years of information," continued Shattner. "It has since been revised to meet the administrative requirements of healthcare and research centers at different stages of automation in the other Canadian provinces, as well as the HIPAA requirements that apply to applications in the USA." "SAND offers us something we have not been able to find until now: a powerful, secure platform for exploring patient data that can be maintained with minimal help from the IT department," said Fabien de Lorenzi, Associate Director of Research, CHUS. "The SAND Healthcare Analytic Server is simple to use, so that each researcher can construct and test hypotheses, and it's fast -- responses to complex queries are usually returned in seconds -- so that our researchers can refine their hypotheses practically as quickly as they can think."