Customer Success

"iRise significantly cuts down the time needed to elicit requirements from hospital staff and iterate workflow improvements, allowing doctors and nurses more time to spend with patients."

– O'Dell Hutchison, Business Systems Analyst, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Background
The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDA) has been leading the fight against cancer for more than 60 years. This cancer-only care hospital helps some 70,000 patients each year, boasts above-average patient outcomes and provides both inpatient and outpatient care. Not only does MDA offer hope to patients with the disease, it also helps develop new weapons against it with its extensive research and teaching facilities and 100 percent cancer-focused faculty.

Challenge
MDA's Electronic Medical Records (EMR) department was tasked with developing an online solution to automate its patient needs assessment process. This critical process compiles personal information about a patient and alerts the hospital staff to any special needs which may require altering the patient's treatment. Because MDA is a highly specialized institution, out-of-the-box EMR solutions do not meet its needs; instead, the EMR department defines and develops its own custom built applications. Prior to the Patient Needs Assessment module, a similar module for documenting patient vital signs and allergies was implemented, which took 10 months for final end user approval. Project stakeholders are both clinical and research nurses who solicit and utilize needs assessment data, so it is imperative that the EMR department reduce the development cycle, affording the hospital staff to spend less time defining and reviewing software and more time tending to patients.

Result
During the definition phase, business analysts interviewed over 20 staff members for project requirements. In real time, business analysts plugged the requirements directly into an iRise simulation. Stakeholders immediately saw the proposed workflow and recognized areas for improvement they could not visualize when drafting requirements. Feedback solicited in these initial meetings dramatically reduced the need for multiple follow-up review sessions. With the flow approved, the EMR department enhanced the visual fidelity of the simulation to look like a final application. The inclusion of developers during the requirements gathering cycle ensured that the high-fidelity simulation looked very similar to the final product, which enabled trainers to develop educational materials directly from the simulation and accelerated adoption as hospital staff members received a familiar application. Simulating the needs assessment project in iRise prior to coding, the EMR department cut the development cycle in half and delivered the online application in five months.