SHANDS HEALTHCARE IMPLEMENTS ORGAN TRANSPLANT TRACKING SOFTWARE

SOFTWARE CAN LOWER ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS, REDUCE POTENTIAL FOR ERRORS

Shands HealthCare, affiliated with the University of Florida Health Science Center in Gainesville, has recently begun using OTTR, the Organ Transplant Tracking Record for all organ transplants.

OTTR is the leading software in the industry for tracking the medical history and progress of patients undergoing organ transplantation, and was created by HKS Medical Information Systems. OTTR was developed to meet the unique clinical and patient management needs of the transplant community, and is currently in use by more than 90 different transplant programs in the United States and Canada.

The Shands Transplant Center at UF is ranked 14th nationally for overall transplants performed. Its transplant program includes six specialties-liver, kidney, pancreas, heart, lung and heart-lung. The Center needed a single database to coordinate the more than 300 transplants performed every year.

"HKS best met our requirements," said Ian Jamieson, transplant manager. "Its main strength is it caters to all transplant programs. They have modules for each of them, therefore meeting the differing needs for each of our six transplant programs." The software helps reduce the potential for errors in an area of medicine where hundreds of pieces of data, such as blood type, medications, lab reports, test results, and other information are required to provide quality patient care. One of the founders of HKS was a transplant surgeon who wanted to eliminate the vast amount of paper charting necessary with transplant patients so more time could be spent providing patient care.

"No software provides patient care, only people provide care," said Doug Perry, President of HKS Medical Information Systems. "But our software can provide quick access to information which lowers the administrative costs for our clients and allows the medical team to spend more time focused on patient care, not paperwork."

ABOUT HKS MEDICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

HKS Medical Information Systems, Inc. is a private company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Founded in 1993 by Dr. Byers Shaw of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Hubert Hickman and Paul Kenyon Ph.D., HKS products improve the quality of patient care and operational efficiencies for its clients. Products include OTTR, the market leader in patient tracking software for organ transplant centers and OTTR-HLA, which is a comprehensive software system to support the patient management, reporting and regulatory needs of the HLA laboratory.