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Jail and prison health care operations are challenging for a number of reasons.  The incarcerated population brings a much higher prevalence of certain clinical conditions (mental health and suicide risk, HIV/AIDS, chronic illnesses, Hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases, drug and alcohol abuse) than the typical community population.  Being able to successfully treat inmate illnesses and ensure appropriate follow-up to clinician orders requires:

• capable and qualified health care professionals
• policies/procedures, forms and workflow; and
• information systems.

Equally challenging to the implementation of clinical applications is managing an infrastructure to deliver these systems at our client facilities.  Installing high speed data networks and ensuring compliance with patient privacy legislation on very short notice requires planning, coordination, innovation and plain hard work.

PHS would like to demonstrate how new developments and updates to our Automated Intake System (AIS), have brought us to “Catalyst: Transforming Care.”

What is CatalystTM?
The word catalyst is defined as “an agent that provokes or speeds significant action”. We believe that this program does exactly that! It represents innovation, momentum, progress…and change. CatalystTM is a very complex point-of-care clinical information system that answers our technological objectives regarding patient care:

• to provide clinicians with point-of-care access to clinical information
• to ensure follow-up of required health services, thereby enhancing the patient safety environment
• to deliver the applications utilizing technology that is feasible to install and support.

How does CatalystTM Work?
The new CatalystTM application contains an interface from our client’s jail management system to manage patient demographics, admissions/discharges and housing changes.  We have incorporated data capture forms for complete intake and history/physical examinations – focused on capturing the data as discrete data elements to enable true clinical decision support. 

We have built an Automated Patient Summary, medication ordering and results management for appointments, lab procedures and imaging procedures.  The built-in value of more than 200 triggers and alerts allow us to contribute to patient safety by ensuring necessary health services are followed up by local site clinicians.

Finally, we have incorporated a number of PHS proprietary tools such as the NETS (Nursing Evaluation Tools) and PIFS (Patient Information Fact Sheets).  We produce all the forms required to maintain a patient chart and have the ability to schedule and execute a number of clinical, operational and scheduling reports.

We believe our systems are superior to commercially available applications due to their ease of implementation and construction based on our expertise as a leading health services provider in the corrections segment. 

Summary

The ability to identify a patient, capture key clinical information as discrete data elements, provide decision support through automated appointment scheduling, alerts & triggers, provide medication and laboratory ordering/results and include forms for the chart as well as operational, clinical and scheduling reports are all included in this unique, internally developed application.

CatalystTM (patent pending) meets the functional requirements of an electronic health record as detailed by the Institute of Medicine. 

Providing health services for the correctional health segment is extremely complex.  The prevalence of chronic illness, mental health issues and infectious disease is significantly higher than the general population.  We believe the utilization of this application will contribute to the safety of the environment in which we deliver services and ensure access to clinical information to support the medical decisions of our clinicians.