United States [change]
Case Studies
Wireless Nursing Documentation
Industry
Health Care and Life Sciences
Business Solution
IBM & Open Solutions
Products and Technologies
- SuperWaba (Java 1.2)
- Java 1.4
- IBM Toolkit for Java
- JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service)
- PDB (Palm Database) files
- Palm OS and POSE (Palm OS Emulator)
- SQL
- Clarinet Infrared wireless networking
Company Overview
The client and its affiliates make up a 200 plus bed full-service general acute healthcare facility serving the healthcare needs of southeastern and central Ohio. The facility is staffed by more than 1,500 employees and a growing team of over 200 physicians who all work together to ensure the client's continuing success in meeting the healthcare needs of the residents of the county.
Business Challenge
The client’s Nursing Documentation Application currently resides on an AS400 mainframe system, and uses a DB2 database. The client engaged Sogeti USA to develop a wireless handheld application to provide similar functionality. The handheld application connects to the same DB2 database as the mainframe application, but has the added convenience of allowing nurses to enter patient vitals at the bedside, instead of using handwritten notes to be typed in later at the mainframe terminal. This allows nurses to spend more time with patients and improves the accuracy of the data.
Solution
Working with the client’s nursing management, Sogeti USA put together the detailed requirements document to define the scope of work on the project and identify all major data collection fields, and warnings. Sogeti USA was responsible for designing and building the SuperWaba handheld application, specifically the navigation design, local PDB data caching, network socket communication, data field warnings and an approach for abstracting the data from the user-interface. The Palm OS application front-end was written using SuperWaba, a proprietary subset of the Java 1.2 platform. The front-end handles displaying data, temporarily caching data by saving to PDB (Palm Database) files, and ultimately submitting the entered data to the server.
The handheld communicates to a server application through an infrared connection. The server was written using the Java 1.4 SDK, runs on a Windows NT platform and provides capability to authenticate a user against the machine’s NT domain. The server is also responsible for connecting to the DB2 database at the client, using IBM’s Toolkit for Java, to retrieve and store data from the database.
Sogeti USA also wrote a configurable database connection pool manager for the server and worked on performance optimizations and testing over the Clarinet IR device.
Results
This advancement allows the client to access and provide critical patient data from hand-held devices. The frequent updates and accuracy of information, results in improved healthcare for client’s patients.