RehabCare Group has created a new application for employee Apple
iPhones that has shortened the processing time for patient prescreens
from as many as 18 hours to less than 60 minutes, the company reports.
The application was created with Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform in
four days, according to Salesforce.com, which offers its Force.com
platform as a rapid application development tool for customers,
partners and developers to create their own applications for
Salesforce.com’s cloud-based enterprise application platform.
"We have a multiple-step screening process that helps ensure we match
our services to our patients’ needs," says Dick Escue, chief
information officer at RehabCare, in a prepared statement.
RehabCare
provides managed rehabilitation care services and also offers
freestanding rehabilitation facilities. “Unfortunately this process was
taking too much time and was impacting our ability to admit patients
quickly.” Escue adds that the Force.com rapid development time met the
company’s needs better than the expected development time of three
months on Microsoft’s .Net platform.
RehabCare’s patient screening process involved manually
completing an evaluation form in the field and then passing that along
to a program director for review and finally to the medical director
for approval.
The Force.com application that runs on the Apple iPhone speeds up the
process so much that the staff can decide on a patient admission within
an hour, the company say. In addition, the application helps ensure the
protection of patient health information.
"In times like these, it’s more important than ever before to ensure
our investments in technology directly support our business goals,”
says Escue. “The Force.com platform proved to be an ideal way to
cost-effectively design and deploy an application that improves our
patient evaluation process, which benefits both our patients and the
company.”
Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform is the basis for more than 800 ISV
partner applications and more than 110,000 custom applications.