T.I.M.E.

Oncology Management

ASCENT's Oncology Management product, T.I.M.E.™, is a comprehensive oncology system designed to help organizations manage the unique care requirements of oncology patients, who often require extended and frequent treatments at ambulatory facilities, hospitals and clinics.

T.I.M.E.™ serves a wide range of clinicians and staff members including oncologists, hematologists, practice assistants, practice nurses, treatment room nurses, pharmacists, clinical research nurses, intake coordinators, social workers, and administrators. It includes features for scheduling patients, managing treatment plans and orders, staging, documentation, and chemotherapy ordering, as well as a radiation therapy interfaces and extensive integration with the T.I.M.E.™ Laboratory Information System (LIS).

ASCENT’s oncology solution is designed with a unified architecture that automates the patient care activities unique to each oncology practice environment. The system is easily and quickly customizable to support each individuals workflow; oncologists, physicians, nurses, pharmacists or administrators.

Organizations that use ASCENTS's Oncology Management system benefit from a streamlined workflow, improved patient safety, and a consistent and managed approach to oncology treatments.

Highlights:

• Practice Management, Electronic Medical Record and LIS on an integrated platform
  
• Automated management of treatment plans and protocols
  
• Electronic Staging Forms
  
• Order management, with powerful decision support
  
• On-line real-time structured patient documentation
  
• Oncology specific clinical flowsheets and plans of care
  
• Interfaces to Hospital Information Systems
  
• Streamlined scheduling of patient appointments

Standard Features

Appointment Scheduling
The T.I.M.E.™ Oncology Management product includes a scheduling component to coordinate appointment scheduling. These scheduling features help users to:

• Automate and streamline patient appointment scheduling
  
• Minimize scheduling errors and missed appointments
  
• Perform conflict checking by resource, personnel, and appointment type
  
• Generate automatic appointment reminders and cancellation notices
  
• Utilize wait lists to minimize/eliminate unproductive time due to cancellations
  
• Improving scheduling efficiency and resource allocation

Order Management
Oncologists are able to manage complex orders set for patients treated in outpatient chemotherapy clinics and in inpatient settings. Powerful decision support features help clinicians to ensure a safe computerized physician order entry. Capabilities include:

• Client-defined protocols
• Chemotherapy ordering (including cumulative and lifetime dose limits and dose range checking)
• Embedded rules, alerts and warnings supported with the most estensive drug database in healthcare

Clinical Flowsheets
Oncologists can utilize a patient-centric flowsheet to format treatment cycle dates and other vital information, including:

• Vital signs
  
• Laboratory work (both internal and external results)
  
• Chemotherapy and radiation treatments and modifications
  
• Premedications
  
• Transfusions
  
• Hydration
  
• Ancillary medications
• Progress notes/reports
  

Staging
ASCENT's Oncology Management product provides clinicians with access to on-line tools provided by the American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC). Staging Forms are included in the system to document tumors, the extent of spread to lymph nodes, and any metastasis. Knowing the state of the disease helps the clinician plan a treatment and determine a prognosis. Staging provides a common language that clinicians can use to communicate a patient's case. Knowing the stage is important to identifying clinical trials that may be suitable for a particular patient.

Interfaces for Communication with Hospital Information Systems
A suite of interfaces is available in the product for communicating with a wide range of other vendors' hospital and physician based systems to ensure coordinated care delivery.
The interfaces can include connectivity to:

• Demographic Information and Quality Management
  
• Nursing Systems
  
• Patient Care and Patient Safety
  
• Internal and external Laboratory and Microbiology
  
• Anatomical Pathology
  
• Blood Bank
  
• Pharmacy
  
• Imaging and Therapeutic Services
  
• Medical Records
  
• Physician Practice Management

T.I.M.E.™ enables an oncologist to select a disease-specific protocol and modify it to create a patient-specific treatment plan that spans multiple visits and locations. Care providers can view and track the status of orders, reports, clinical results and drug interactions.

 

Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) System

Unfortunately medication errors occur frequently in hospital and ambulatory settings. They do not often lead to death or serious injury, but such outcomes are on the rise. In outpatient settings, they have increased more than eightfold. The best available evidence indicates that although a sizeable percentage of Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) in hospitals and outpatient settings are preventable, relatively few medical errors are detected using today’s common but relatively ineffective paper-based detection methods.

It’s estimated that between 30% and 60% of cancer patients receive some form of chemotherapy. Systemic treatment (chemotherapy) is complex to manage and has a narrow therapeutic range: if the dosage is too low the patient will not get the benefits of the treatment; if the dosage is too high it may be toxic and potentially fatal. Yet despite this complexity in cancer care, chemotherapy and other systemic therapies are largely managed by paper-based systems. These paper-based systems are more vulnerable to errors - including fatal errors - than electronic systems.

ASCENT Integrated Medical Solutions is in the forefront of using electronic technologies to reduce the likelihood of prescribing errors through the development a CPOE system specific to medical oncology and hematology.

Working in conjunction with clinicians, ASCENT developed a CPOE system unique to the cancer setting, called T.I.M.E.™ - Totally Integrated Medical Enterprise. This CPOE system for oncology eliminates the scenario where a harmful drug error can occur because of incorrect reading of handwriting or incorrect calculation of dosage.

T.I.M.E.™ provides physicians with a menu of medication protocols from regimens that are specifically created by physicians, pharmacists and nurses: complete with default doses and a range of potential doses for each medication. It also ensures that all drug orders are legible and can display patient-specific, relevant laboratory results on the screen at the time of ordering. It can also check for drug-allergy contradictions and drug-drug interactions. T.I.M.E.™ also flags drug allergies, drug-drug interactions, or drug-disease interactions when medications are ordered, thus assisting clinicians in making the most appropriate clinical decisions at the point of care.

Impressive cost savings have been demonstrated when a CPOE intervention is used in conjunction with such clinical decision support systems as:

• Using the less expensive medication within a class of drugs, or using a lower dose or a lower frequency, when such suggestions are supported by oncology based medical literature
• Using appropriate laboratory tests
• Encouraging patients’ placement on critical pathways or science-based treatment guidelines

The T.I.M.E.™ oncology system provides a solution for the four distinct stages of the drug ordering-delivery system:

• physician ordering
• authorization and verification
• pharmacy dispensing and delivery
• nurse administration to the patient

The T.I.M.E.™ system can be integrated to any existing electronic medical records system in place.

TIME Benefits by Care Provider Group

Physicians	Phamacists	Nurses	Patients
Proven adoption (system is fast and easy to use)	Provides standardized, innovative therapy regimens	Electronic Medication Administration Record allows for real time charting of patient information	Reduces order-to-patient time
Eliminates/reduces common medication errors	Ensures orders are received in real time	Provides interactive alerts for clinician decision support	Reduces adverse events
Provides clinical decision support at the point of care	Provides automatic claims providing	Flexible to suit nurses' unique workflow needs	Decreases morbidity and mortality
			Patients receive the right drug, right dose, right route at the right time

 

TIME Oncology EMR Benefits