HealthManagement, Volume 7 - Issue 1, 2012 HIT
Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL) is made up of 14 public hospitals, 123 surgical units and handles 900,000 medical appointments every year. The MyHCL project aims to facilitate the lives of our patients and increase their loyalty by offering online services like appointment requests, admissions, meetings or follow-up.
MyHCL is a web application with a rich user interface created with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Javascript, Ajax and Microsoft Lync. Security required by the process of personal medical data is obtained through https protocol, one time passwords, distributed databases and data encryption. Interoperability with local hospital networks is provided by the WCF technology and SSIS transfers from local network to the MyHCL servers.
The benefits of MyHCL include:
- Secretaries are less disturbed by phone calls (-20 percent) and they don’t print and send appointment confirmations and summaries (100,000 mails saved per year).
- Chronic patients don’t need to fax their laboratory results or queue up for admission. They send e-requests instead (30 percent less people waiting at admission desks).
- Physicians keep in touch with their patients at home and can decide to adapt a treatment or meet a patient earlier if they detect worrying symptoms.
MyHCL is unique because it is generic enough to be used by any hospital but is also customisable so any care unit can design their own specific MyHCL feature, like the “Memory troubles follow- up” or “Prostatectomy follow-up”. Patients can subscribe to these features in the “MyHCL Store”.
The main obstacle was to change healthcare professionals’ minds. The bigger technical challenge was to imagine the most intuitive application that is still secure and precise enough to meet medical needs. The project achieved its goal by connecting hospital to home and allowing organisational improvements. MyHCL sheds new light to the hospital information system by involving the patient in it.
