St. Luke's Methodist Hospital gets a dose of Alpha for healthy applications

There are few things more gratifying to a vendor of a development tool than learning how their product -- in our case, Alpha Five -- is being used to solve real-world problems with a truly human dimension.

Here's an example of how St. Luke's Methodist Hospital is using Alpha Five to improve delivery of health care. The plain text case study follows, or you can view it in all its PDF glory.

Customer Profile
St. Luke’s Methodist Hospital offers a wide array of health care services to patients and their families, including birth care, emergency services, minimally invasive surgery, physical medicine and rehab, and women’s health.

Location
Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Industries
Health care

Situation
St. Luke's Respiratory Care department was struggling to maintain a current, updated database application that served a hectic hospital environment, and complied with HIPAA and other regulations. St. Luke's nurses would begin entering data, only to be called away from their work station, leaving records incomplete. The hospital needed a self-maintaining system that multiple nurses could access from multiple workstations. St. Luke's also wanted the system to provide a billing platform, manage scheduling, and give detailed data to therapists and physicians. In addition, the application had to run on St. Luke's hospital server, and give nurses 24/7 access. Perhaps most challenging, development costs had to fit St. Luke's modest project budget.

Solution
St. Luke's contacted Cole Custom Programming's head programmer, Martin Cole, for a solution. With over 40 years of experience in client accounting, database development, and computer programming, Cole knew an operational application with the capabilities St. Luke's required could cost tens of thousands of dollars-well outside the hospital's budget. To meet the hospital's cost restraints, Cole chose Alpha Five. Its professional visual programming tools helped Cole build St. Luke's application in a fraction of the time it would have taken had he chosen another platform, which dramatically reduced cost. In particular, Cole leveraged Alpha's Xbasic language and Xdialog building tools to rapidly prototype and finalize the application design for St. Luke's specific needs.

Benefits
The result: a rapid, intuitive, seamless, unbreakable system that addresses literally all of the hospital's challenges, within budget. Its self-reliant design lets respiratory nurses leave a record in the middle of modifying it, without having to worry about losing or compromising data. The reliable system also maintains and provides detailed patient data for therapists and physicians, and is available around the clock to all staff from the hospital server. Moreover, the program is scalable, letting multiple nurses work simultaneously from any one of 200 available workstations. In fact, the new system has been so successful, St. Luke's has extended it to the courier department for billing, and created a program that helps nurses automatically manage their irregular schedules.

For More Information
Alpha Software, Inc.
781-229-4500
www.AlphaSoftware.com

St. Luke's Hospital
319-369-7211
www.StLukesCR.org

If you're an Alpha Five user and you would like to share your true story here, contact Kate Ritchie from Alpha's PR team at 610-642-8253 ext. 162, or KateR@GregoryFCA.com.