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July 26, 2010

Acesis: Dynamic Business Applications to Improve Patient Care


From peer reviews to incident reports to case management, hospitals collect and analyze a variety of different kinds of data to manage caregiver performance and improve the quality of care. When an issue arises out of a review, a quality improvement team will dig further into the data to develop an action plan to address potential problems. Hospitals continually strive to document every process and develop new best practices to ensure that the bar is continually raised on the level of care provided by the institution.

The challenge for the hospital, though, is that over time, each department may have developed its own tools and processes. This can lead to an expensive and inefficient “silo” approach, where data collected by one department is not shared with others, and there is insufficient communication between hospital functional areas. For example, one department may be using spreadsheets while another has purchased a software package, making the sharing of data challenging and compromising the potential solution for improvement.

Acesis (News - Alert), headquartered in Silicon Valley, is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that is trying to address the challenge of data capture and access in the hospital quality management arena. According to Kevin Chesney, CEO, Acesis has “solutions that empower physicians and healthcare providers” by giving them access to a “fully integrated quality management system.”

Traditionally, software was purchased and loaded on the hospital’s own computers. Over the last few years, there has been a move toward SaaS (News - Alert), where the software is hosted on a remote server and made available to multiple users. When a new version is released, everyone has immediate access and the hospital can avoid costly upgrades and system downtime. It can also put the power in the hands of the user rather than the IT department, freeing them for more complicated enterprise-wide challenges.

The Acesis user interface is intuitive and the system allows for maximum flexibility. Being able to dynamically add fields or easily develop custom reports makes the process much more user friendly, and more importantly, allows access by other departments and committees. Acesis has found that silos turn into multidisciplinary teams, and that studies can be easily replicated and scaled.

Acesis recently signed an agreement with University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) division of hospital medicine to use their platform for inpatient case review. Physicians like the ability to get started without having to use IT resources, and the dashboard functions lets them see the data and analysis quickly and easily. Acesis has an impressive list of partners including McKesson, IBM (News - Alert) and Adobe who have helped them build a platform that falls under the category of “dynamic business applications,” a term coined by Forester Research. A Dynamic Business Application is a software system that “is built for change, very adaptable and data rich.”

According to Chesney, Acesis is on the forefront of innovation, and being able to “continually adapt and be quick to implement” will give them a competitive advantage.


Robin Wright is a consultant with more than 20 years of experience in the IT and telecom industries. To read more of her articles, please visit please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda
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