April/June 2013 - LiveData, Inc: Improving the Quality of Patient Care and Lowering Costs in the Perioperative Suite

Jeffrey Robbins, AV
Critical Care Nursing Quarterly

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), The Joint Commission, the National Quality Forum, and the World Health Organization are among the world bodies that are developing patient-safety standards. Successfully complying with new protocols tends to increase the workload of caregivers, distract from patient care, and demand greater administrative outlay from hospitals. Various initiatives to improve the quality of patient care are coupled with pressure to reduce healthcare costs. LiveData Inc. has been addressing these challenges since entering the healthcare sector in 2004, at a time when the issue of patient safety was coming to the forefront. This article provides background on the evolution of patient safety issues, and describes how applying technology to improve operational workflow and patient safety in the perioperative suite improves the quality of care and reduces cost.

February 2013 - Designing better mouse trap ideal for OR Scheduling

Surgical workflows shed some kinks from automated schedule management

by Jeannie Akridge
Healthcare Purchasing News

Anyone who’s played the classic game Mouse Trap knows that the more moving parts in any process or piece of equipment, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong. Surgical staff experience this on a routine basis. Just ask someone who’s worked in an OR how many times they’ve had to stop what they were doing to find something or someone needed to start or move a case along — be it surgeon or staff, surgical instruments or equipment, medication, or even a patient. While an automated scheduling program or electronic medical record system may intend to set in motion a specific chain of events, it’s often not until prep begins for the first case of the day that the surgical team finds out that some key pieces are missing. And every delay adds exponentially more time to a very expensive clock.

Oct. 2012 - Value-Based Purchasing Core Measure Improvement; Health Management Technology

The challenge of finding cost-effective solutions to improve VBP core measure results should lead hospitals to appropriate technology, significant process improvement and ultimately better, less expensive perioperative care. 

July 10, 2012 - LiveData gets $500K for Hospital Workflow System; Mass High Tech

Cambridge software company LiveData Inc. has received a $500,000 contract award from the U.S. Army Small Business Administration Commercialization Pilot Program to provide data integration and display technologies in military hospitals including the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. 

July/August 2012 - Outperform the Competition: Hospital Value-Based Purchasing; Patient Safety Quality Healthcare

Competition to capture the highest incentive payments from the Medicare Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program is going to be very tight. “Even if you are above the 90th percentile, you could still have a very poor score and leave money on the table,” said Tami Lewis in a recent Modern Healthcare article.1 As Director of Service Excellence at Robinson Memorial Hospital, Ravenna, Ohio, she is among the many hospital quality administrators who are looking at a competition where several tenths of a point can represent a forfeit of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal reimbursements. But there’s a way to gain an edge ... 

July 16, 2012 - U.S. News Ranks Best Hospitals 2012-2013 America's new No. 1 medical center: Mass General

This year, the Honor Roll is led for the first time by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Mass General displaces Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which held the list’s No. 1 spot for 21 consecutive years. LiveData and Massachusetts General Hospital share a history of collaboration dedicated to safe surgery and successful patient outcomes. 

July 23, 2012 - A Dashboard for OR Patient Safety Optimization, Healthcare Informatics

Ranked Healthcare Informatics #1 Most Popular Article
In May of this year, leaders at the Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, a division of the 11-community-hospital Saint Luke’s Health System, based in Kansas City, Mo., went live with an advanced patient safety platform called OR-Dashboard, which was developed for Saint Luke’s by LiveData, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. 

March 2012 - Innovative Medical Devices Improve Patient Safety; Healthcare Purchasing News

So many products cry out for their attention today that selecting new additions for their stock of medical supplies can be a daunting task...

Dec. 2011/January 2012 - CMS Deploys Energy Smart Grid Project, Remote Magazine

The article describes how CMS Enterprises chose to manage their smart grid with a state-of-the-art LiveData  solution that included LiveData's RTI technology and SmartGrid Manager. 

April/June 2011 - Hospital Checklists: Transforming Evidence-Based Care and Patient Safety Protocols into Routine Practice

Drawing on research, recent initiatives, and the company’s experience in high-acuity units, Robbins explores the implications and challenges of implementing checklists in today’s hospitals. If a checklist is to succeed as a mechanism for transforming evidence-based care and safety protocols into best and actual practice, it needs to be used consistently and durably; to achieve this, hospitals need to foster a supportive environment as well as acquire a system to monitor, measure, and manage a culture that effectively embraces checklists. 

Feb. 8, 2011 - Keeping it real in the OR, Health Management Technology

National attention to patient safety has generated a host of initiatives, following studies demonstrating significant reductions in errors and deaths. These reductions depend upon a confluence of factors. 

Feb. 23, 2011 - Checklists Alone Won't Change Health Care: The Full Story, The Huffington Post

"Ten years ago at Johns Hopkins, my team began adapting aviation checklists to medicine. In 2006 we published a landmark paper in the New England Journal of Medicine detailing how we used checklists to nearly eliminate infections, not just in one hospital, but throughout the entire state of Michigan. We are now spreading that program to every hospital in the United States..."

March 30, 2010 - Operating Room Radiography to Transform Surgery

In a move that could change the way many patients undergo surgery, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has installed five state-of-the-art Siemens Artis zeego® medical imaging systems that provide faster, more accurate 3-D images of the body with a quality never before attainable.  

Feb. 23, 2010 - On the same screen in the East Cooper OR, HealthcareIT News 

When East Cooper Medical Center in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. moves into its new 140-bed hospital in April, it will roll out new technology in its eight operating rooms to provide a real-time information dashboard style for everyone to see at the same time.

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