A North Bay software development company claims it has an ideal document management solution for hospitals about to transition to Meditech’s new MAGIC software release.
Mindoka Technology’s web-based document management system is being used by several health-care organizations, including the North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit, the Brant County Health Unit and St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener, but the release of Meditech’s MAGIC software could result in a flood of sales to hospitals across North America, claims Tobel Graves, the company’s chief technology officer.
The Meditech MOX system, traditionally used for document management purposes, isn’t supported by the new MAGIC platform, forcing hospitals to run two versions of Meditech simultaneously or look for another solution, he said.
The North Bay company has partnered with Texas-based Interface People LP, or IPeople, a software integration company serving Meditech users, to market the Mindoka Information Resource System (MIRS) to hospitals transitioning to the MAGIC platform.
Hospitals have reams of documents, including policies and procedures, employee manuals, and evacuation plans that need to be managed and accessible to employees, said Graves. The web-based MIRS solution offers hospitals numerous advantages over legacy document management systems commonly in use.
For starters, there is no special software required at the client end and no need to purchase licenses for every user. Any web browser will do.
“That’s a big deal in the health-care sector because you don’t need to have 500 or 600 copies of MS Word or PDF viewers,” said Graves.
The system is easy to use and update.
“If you make a change to a policy or procedure, it notifies everyone on the distribution list for the document and tracks whether they have read it and signed off on it,” said Mindoka president and CEO Dave Crewson. “Users are notified either by email or by a pop-up notification when they log into the system.”
MIRS was originally developed to serve the document management needs of Northern Ontario’s forestry sector and is now being used by several large mining suppliers, but it’s a solution adaptable to almost any kind of organization. At the core of the solution is Mindoka’s D3C document conversion engine, which converts Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, among others for web viewing, retaining the original formatting. In order to publish a document to the web, a user simply drags it into a D3C folder. The D3C engine does the rest.
Allowing the owners of documents to publish and make changes to them eliminates bottlenecks and enhances operational efficiency, said Todd Short, vice-president of business development.
“There was one story we heard about the head of nursing who had to make a change to a document. She gave it to the IT department to post in October. Three months later, it still hadn’t been published. That wouldn’t happen with our system.”
Big push
Mindoka’s big push into the health-care sector was made possible when it came up with a way to extract documents from Meditech’s proprietary MOX system.
“We researched the internal structure of MOX and figured out how to extract documents and get them out of Meditech and into the real world,” said Graves. “It was no small feat. We’re the only company that has done this so far.”
Documents stored in MOX can only display text with very limited formatting. MIRS, on the other hand, accommodates photographs, charts, evacuation route maps and logos. It’s also searchable, password-protected and permission-based, ensuring that documents can only be viewed or changed by authorized personnel.
The system is able to generate a report showing everyone who has read a new or modified document and provides an audit trail identifying document versions in place for a specific date.
Graphically richer documents and photographs, said Crewson, can be much more effective at communicating information such as the correct configuration of instruments for surgical trays.
Documents can also be accessed by mobile browsers.
