2015
During a business trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for CompassAFM, I (Dominic Murnane, Managing Director, CompassAFM) had made a couple of sales presentations for our other product FacilityManager to hospitals located there. One of which, I had the opportunity to visit was just so far ahead of anything I had seen in Ireland, with a totally paperless system for managing patients and their care. On presentation, each patient was given an Apple iPad to keep with them during their visit which accessed their full medical history. Doctors and nurses then referenced and added to the live data during the patients visit. Scans and test results were fed directly to the iPad as they were completed.
Even with FacilityManager, CompassAFM had not reached this level of automation and paperless administration. However, this was a one-off system designed, built and operated on an unlimited budget, which would be hard to replicate elsewhere. A seed of an idea was sown, but there it stayed.
2018
In 2018 an opportunity presented itself where I was able to actively engage long-term (over 3 years) with the Emergency Department in a major trauma hospital. My previous experience had been limited to a couple of short visits as a patient. I would never have envisioned how dynamic, busy, complex and team oriented was the environment that presented itself. Now I was able to see how and ED operated from the perspective of a staff member.
I had expected a more software orientated environment for patient care, but as with most other hospitals, I have since researched, software was used to track patient location and events whereas paper was used still to record patient care and treatment. This made the overall patient administration very time consuming and laborious. The idea resurfaced - could CompassAFM build a better software solution? There was a long learning curve ahead.
2019
By mid-2019, the idea was developing, I had decided to continue using the FileMaker Pro database platform due to its flexibility, adaptability and ease of use. There were many concepts and design features already built into FacilityManager that could be reused or modified.
Initial research on software companies supplying EDIS / EHR software indicated that it was -
- Extremely expensive and beyond the reach of many hospital budgets
- User unfriendly
- One solution to suit all, very difficult or impossible to modify to suit individual hospital requirements.
