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Clinical Webware Corporation
30 Cleopatra Court
Orillia Ontario L3V 7Y7
(705) 325-2201, ex 3636
Clinical WebWare Corporation specializes in the custom development of cost-effective software solutions that optimize healthcare processes.
Clinical WebWare (CWW) was founded in 2000 by Gary Arsenault with a corporate vision to design globally competitive software in Canada and make the software available to hospitals and health care agencies at a fraction of the price charged by large software companies.
Clinical WebWare has a unique advantage in that it maintains offices in a clinical setting, thereby facilitating constant communication and feedback from doctors, nurses, clinicians, accountants and support staff during the development phase of its software. The immediate identification of user needs and requirements expedites the development process with an exceptional level of accuracy.
About the Company
Clinical WebWare has over 25 years combined experience in the development of custom software solutions for the healthcare industry. The company’s success in developing cost effective solutions is attributable to ongoing technical training and the development of close business relationships with its clients.
Clinical WebWare exploits the latest development tools available in the industry in order to expedite the software development life cycle. In recent years, the company has developed significant expertise in HL7, an industry standard protocol, and has become very proficient at integrating foreign systems using this standard.
Its most prestigious HL7 project to date is the integration of Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital’s Admission/Discharge/Transfer (ADT), Radiology Information System (RIS), Transcription and Lab systems with the electronic Child Healthcare Network (eCHN)), a secure electronic data base that allows the sharing of childrens’ health records by health care providers across Ontario.
Existing Products
Clinical WebWare’s expertise is focused on designing software solutions for the healthcare community. Clinical WebWare offers a suite of applications for hospitals including:
- Admission/Discharge/Transfer System (ADT)
An intuitively designed application to record admissions, discharges, and transfers of patients and compile the daily census of a healthcare facility.
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Emergency Information System including Touch Screen Triage (EIS)
A comprehensive solution for quick and effective patient triage, patient registration, access to patient results, and patient tracking.
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Radiology Information System (RIS)
A comprehensive solution to manage patient scheduling, patient billing, materials management, and radiologist reports.
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Operating Room Management System (ORMS
A powerful tool to manage patient scheduling, human resources, and equipment required for surgery. The colour-coded scheme for scheduling, along with the drag and drop functionality, creates a rich graphical user interface (GUI) experience.
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Enterprise Patient Scheduling (EPS)
An extension of ORMS allowing for ambulatory clinics to schedule patients and resources using a consistent and feature rich GUI throughout the enterprise.
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Patient Information & Results (PIR)
Phase I of the data warehousing project to store patient results from third party software vendors in a common database.
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LabRat (LABoratory Results And Test viewer)
Phase II of data warehousing project to store patient results from third party software vendors in a common database. Features include current and historical results, cumulative views, alerts, and abnormal result flags.
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Clinical Information System (CIS)
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A generic patient registration/management system for the healthcare enterprise typically used in clinics within a hospital.
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Patient Billing System (PBS)
A robust patient billing system for MOH, WSIB, third party insurance, and selfpay claims. The application is tightly integrated to the general ledger using the industry standard HL7 protocol.
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Diabetes Education Centre Software Solution (DEC)
Software that tracks all diabetes-related data and maintains a database that can be readily used for statistics, patient education, and monitoring of the disease. Patient education is facilitated through the use of graphs, charts, colour-coded fields, and an easy-to-follow graphical user interface.
White Board and Patient Tracking
Phase I of software technology that includes drag and drop functionality for recording patient movement, colour-coded medical indicators, and an intuitive interface to provide easy access to patient results directly from the white board.
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The Future
Clinical WebWare is constantly reviewing changes in the healthcare industry, and has identified software gaps and development opportunities, that will drive research efforts in the foreseeable future.
Renal Educators Software
Renal educators lack a turnkey solution designed from the ground up to support their demanding workload. Too often these specialized clinics are expected to operate with applications designed for other segments of the healthcare system.
Clinical Webware is designing an electronic medical record and education tool for renal educators that will integrate with the existing CWW Diabetes Education Centre Software Solution. This is particularly important since renal patients often suffer from diabetes, and supporting technology will require a seamless solution for educators at both clinics. The challenges in developing such a product are significant.
The goal of the renal education project is to provide a central record of all dialysis related data elements including lab results, medication dosage summaries, and treatment paths. Providing point of care data entry will require streamlined data entry interfaces delivered via portable devices, such as tablet, mobile workstations and/or handheld devices. Portable devices require a certain amount of client side caching resulting in a need for secure communications and encryption of data.
Another unique aspect of this project is the wide array of satellite clinics with varying infrastructure resulting in the need to maintain data synchronization between clinics. Since many clinics cannot provide zero down time connections it will be necessary to provide batch synchronization.
A complex field-level read/write access control system must be provided since the users roles will differ significantly throughout the application scope. Not all users will be working in a common domain environment so maintaining an infrastructure-dependent role-based security model will produce further challenges. Where possible, communication directly with dialysis equipment (input and output) will be provided for improved data collection and treatment planning.
Radio Frequency Identification Technology
Another ambitious development project is the implementation of the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in CWW’s Emergency Whiteboard and Patient Tracking System using the new single-use active-RFID location tags embedded within the patient’s wristband. Advantages to implementing RFID with this application include the ability to manage patient flow in real time and allow timely access to medical records for physicians and nurses while providing accurate access control and security. Further, RFID tracking should reduce the risk of misidentifying patients.
While the utilization of RFID tracking in the logistics industry has become almost commonplace, its implementation in the clinical environment, for patient/asset tracking, presents many unique challenges. Of primary concern is the ability to ensure signal availability in all possible patient locations while effecting cost reductions by using existing wireless infrastructure. As well, a real-time alert system (e.g. alarm when patient leaves defined area) will be required as will visual mapping of location in the structural environment. Finally, it will be necessary to develop an intuitive interface to provide one-touch access to patient files in the coverage area.
Challenges and Collaborations
Like most young companies, Clinical Webware Corporation has encountered its share of challenges but the firm has been able to mitigate many of the risks by building a close collaborative relationship with Orillia Soldiers' Memorial Hospital where it has designed customized software applications.
A turning point for Clinical WebWare occurred in 2002 with the development of a prototype model for a Diabetes Educators’ software solution. With the financial assistance of NRC, CWW was able to design a robust set of components for its development library, complementing future development projects. As a result, the company has been able to accelerate its development project life cycle significantly and is currently entertaining complementary partnerships with a variety of healthcare organizations.
(Gary Arsenault is the President of Clinical WebWare Corporation, and Matt Stone is a Senior Software Developer for the company. For more information please visit www.clinicalwebware.ca)
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