Guest Spot: ED Monitor Paints Picture for Newton Medical Center

Contributed by: Glenn Wiens, Newton Medical Center

Newton Medical Center, located in Newton, Kansas, is an 103-bed, not-for-profit facility dedicated to providing health care services to residents of Harvey and surrounding counties, offering a wide variety of services and professional specialties.

Glenn Wiens, Integration Specialist and DBA for Newton Medical Center, has been reading The MEDITECH Community Bulletin for several years now and has periodically emailed us about some of the helpful hints he's gleaned from John Sharpe's Tricks of the Trade column.  However, he's always hoped to find additional tips for MEDITECH Data Repository users.  Well, last month's column about how to use DPMs, Segments, & Fields to map your way from NPR to the DR inspired Glenn to dust off one of his projects and make it mail-ready for our next issue.

The Emergency Department Monitor is a self-updating utility which displays ED activity for the last 24 hours.  Some time ago, Wiens was approached by one of their ED physicians requesting a graphical depiction of their ED patients with event history and acuity level.  According to Wiens, "It is something I wanted to learn to do, so I worked through it step-by-step. It could probably be improved by someone who knows more about Java Graphical User Interface coding, but it does work."  Not only does it work, but it has helped Newton Medical Center paint a picture for their ED staff to know exactly what's going on with their patients over a 24-hour period.

Below is a sample screen-shot of the finished application.   Click here to enlarge and view the full-sized image.

The ED Monitor features:

• The current date and time in the upper left-hand corner.
• Just below it is a vu-type meter as well as a number.  The number represents the acuity level of patients currently in the ED.  The meter graphs this number against activity for the last 24 hours, showing what acuity is compared to the last day.
• The main display area is laid out with the hours of the day (from midnight on the left to 11:59 pm on the right).
• The horizontal blue line represents the current time.  Patients are shown as horizontal lines with associated events as vertical tics.
• The section to the right of this is the legend area.  The horizontal lines are colored according to their acuity level.
• The various events are grouped into broad categories of similar types.  Each event category is colored according to the legend.

Wiens wrote the code for his ED Monitor in Java with embedded SQL against the MEDITECH Data Repository.  Click here to view the code as a text file and follow his instructions to compile the code.

While Newton Medical Center's ED staff was the immediate beneficiary of Wiens's determination and dedication, we can all agree that their patients will ultimately benefit from this utility.  And now, thanks to Glenn's contribution to our newsletter, many other facilities and their patients can benefit, too.  Thank you, Glenn.

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Glenn Wiens is Integration Specialist and DBA for Newton Medical Center in Newton, Kansas.  Glenn earned his B.S. in Business Administration from Newman University and has 20 years of Healthcare IT experience.  At Newton Medical Center, Glenn is responsible for managing the MEDITECH Data Repository and Mirth HL7 Interface Engine.  Feel free to contact Glenn with feedback or any questions at glenn.wiens@newmedctr.org.