UCLA Health System cuts information processing times from weeks to hours using IBM DB2 9 with pureXML

For more than half a century, UCLA Health System has provided the best in healthcare and the latest in medical technology to the people of Los Angeles and throughout the world. With its wide-reaching system of primary-care and specialty-care offices, UCLA Health System is among the most comprehensive and advanced healthcare systems in the world.

Challenge
The UCLA patient oriented document system (PODS) is an electronic medical record repository that supports care delivery across the organization’s medical centers. The repository is a major component of the organization’s medical record management system, which provides a central portal for more than 6,000 clinicians to securely access patient information. However, with more than 400 different types of medical forms and updates occurring twice a week, database administrators needed a simple yet fast method to add new types of medical data and test results to the system. They also wanted to provide medical staff with fast retrieval of patient information. Traditional paper-driven processes that were previously used to support data integration and migration efforts were prone to human error and could take weeks to complete.

Solution
To speed data integration and retrieval of patient information and medical forms, UCLA Health System adopted XML as its standard data platform for medical data. Using XML, the organization gained a flexible and extensible data model that can easily handle schema diversity, schema evolution and sparse data. To efficiently manage XML data, the organization selected IBM DB2 9.5 with pureXML capabilities. Using IBM DB2 with pureXML capabilities within a service oriented architecture (SOA) UCLA Health System has optimized data integration and migration processes to better manage information over its lifetime and as part of care delivery processes. Now new medical forms and data definitions can be added to the patient-oriented document system with a click of a button. This has reduced the time required to add new forms from 2 weeks to less than 2 hours. As a result, the organization can quickly expand its patient-oriented document system, moving towards its goal of electronic medical records (EMR) and reduced paperwork to improve the efficiency and accuracy of patient care.

The solution has also increased staff productivity to optimize organizational performance. For example, it reduced the labor required to add new data definitions and data to the repository. Previously, it took 3 administrators about one week to add new data definitions. Now, one person can complete the same job in just one hour. Additionally, the solution has made the environment easier to manage by eliminating 20 stored procedures and decreasing the number of database tables that administrators must manage from 30 to 5. With these time savings, database administrators can focus on expanding the types of information available through the portal. Tight data integration is helping eliminate human processing errors for increased accuracy in the storage of medical data.

For medical staff, IBM DB2 data server is providing faster access to patient information with retrieval response times of 3 seconds or less. To date, the organization has processed over 20 million documents with 400 schemas for a total of 2 million patients through this system.

Ultimately, the UCLA electronic medical record repository—which uses IBM WebSphere MQ and IBM WebSphere Application Server software in conjunction with a centralized clinical portal to aggregate applications and content and deliver them as role-based applications—will help clinicians to continue to deliver top quality patient care as the organization grows. Additionally, the repository will provide researchers from the UCLA Medical Sciences organization with a single source to collect information regarding patient care while helping ensure identifying information is removed.

Benefits

• Reduced time required to add new forms from 2 weeks to less than 2 hours
• Nearly 83 percent decrease in number of database tables that administrators must manage
• 70 percent reduction in number of database staff needed to add new schemas and data into the system

“The use of DB2 pureXML simplifies database management. It is almost maintenance free and the robustness of the system and the simplicity of the design are satisfying. Usually DBAs are hesitant to use a new system, but not in this case.”
—Li Cui, Database Administrator, UCLA Health System