"Easy to use and quick to analyze"

Medical Cooperative of Canelones (Comeca) has decided to computerize all of the institution's operations and create a corporate Data Warehouse in order to rationalize the management of the hospital. Comeca has two hospitals and nine branches throughout the country servicing more than 30 thousand members and covering all areas of specialization.

The project -carried out by Apraful Software- started with information input from the emergency area (patient admission, clinical records, etc.). Until now, all this information used to be on paper. By using GXplorer, from the Excel environment, doctors succeeded in obtaining the required parameters in order to assess the performance of the emergency area.
"From an environment which is easy to use and quick to be analyzed we managed to obtain the required data and design graphs with useful parameters for management analysis," said Comeca's doctor Sergio Burguez. He added that some of the parameters that are used are, for instance, the number of appointments per doctor, per shift, releases, admissions, and age ranges.
This first experience in using the GXplorer technology revealed that doctors were codifying part of the information, rather than the whole and that the inflow of patients in the emergency area does not call, so far, for hiring new employees.

Results are published all throughout the institution, and by using this system, the patients clinical records are available for emergency doctors and for the use of the hospital. Later on, and once all of the institution's branches start getting connected to the system, they will also be able to access this information.
The next step will be starting production of information for handling diagnosis techniques in order to assess expenses and compare them according to their use and their result. Later on will come the incorporation of data corresponding to pharmacy order-expedition into the Data Warehouse, and finally the incorporation of the information corresponding to patient hospitalization.
This project adds on to the preventive medicine strategy carried out by Comeca, which already has a center for the diagnosis of breast cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

Apraful Software is a software house that is mainly focused on systems development for the health area. It has been in the Uruguayan market for ten years, and in 2002 it incorporated GeneXus as a development tool. Magik, its product, since then has evolved with GeneXus and incorporated GXplorer, ARTech's Data Warehouse tool.
Magik has 12 modules and has been installed in several institutions providing medical assistance in Uruguay, such as Servicio Médico Integral, Camcel (Medical Cooperative of Cerro Largo), Banco de Seguros del Estado, and Comeca (Medical Cooperative of Canelones).