Site of Care Systems LLC

Founded in 1995, Site of Care Systems markets clinical management software for doctors and hospitals in the maternal/child services area. A"point of service" approach to systems results in products that are relevant and responsive to care providers and managers. Site of Care products are currently used in many California hospitals, including: California Pacific Medical Center, Marin General Hospital, Sutter-Davis Hospital, Mills-Peninsula Hospital, Stanford University Hospital, Packard Children's Hospital, and others.

Initially developed in 1988 by Elliott Main, MD and Terri Slagle, MD at Children's Hospital in San Francisco, The Perinatal Data Center is the flagship product for Site of Care Systems, serving hospital labor, delivery, and regular and intensive care nursery departments. Combining interactive software with a series of medical record forms, this system automates discharge summaries, billing sheets, birth certificates, delivery and nursery logbooks, medical record abstracting, quality assessment tools and reports, and over 50 other pre-formatted reports. The Perinatal Data Center equips physicians and administrators with the information necessary to operate with improved efficiency. All of this adds up to substantial administrative savings for patients, hospitals, and enterprises.

The 4th Dimension Choice

Frustrated by the lack of data, reporting, and querying features available from existing hospital mainframe systems, Drs. Elliott Main and Terri Slagle decided to build a system to meet their hospital's clinical and quality management needs. The two physicians reviewed a variety of authoring environments on both Macintosh® and IBM PC platforms. The complexity of medical data required a graphical user interface, so they gravitated to the Mac's rich interface capabilities. At that time, 4th Dimension outclassed Helix and other environments with its full-feature set thus becoming the obvious choice. In 1995, the two physicians, along with Bill Craddock, formed Site of Care Systems LLC to market The Perinatal Data Center and its companion modules to other hospitals.

Improving Performance

As Site of Care's technical requirements continue to expand, co-founder Bill Craddock notes"we have always been impressed with 4th Dimension's ability to get you to the next level." Through every stage of development, Craddock explains,"4D's feature set has allowed us to take our applications to ever higher levels of functionality all the time hiding the applications complexity from the user."

The availability of 3rd party externals, such as ASG's Super Report and Foresight's Arealist Pro, has significantly enhanced Site of Care's applications. Externals have proved invaluable and external developers have been highly responsive to their market needs.

Cross-Platform Solution

The ability to deliver a cross-platform solution was vital to the longevity of the company. 4D's cross-platform shift into the Windows market in 1995 was critical to Site of Care's product enhancements."Healthcare organizations remain predominantly Windows/DOS-based." The ability"to deliver a cross-platform solution was vital to the longevity of our company," adds Craddock. 4th Dimension's cross-platform functionality has enabled their Mac-based applications to run seamlessly under Windows, with very little rewriting of code. Craddock is appreciative of the nice job 4D has done delivering a Windows line of products.

Balancing Needs

4D really delivers on the power and promise of a 4GL. Designing clinical information systems while balancing various system requirements is a difficult task indeed. Therefore, Site of Care developers relied on 4D's promise to deliver a powerful 4GL. According to Bill Craddock, incorporating critical system requirements such as: data analysis, state reporting specs, clinical requirements, and billing needs into one"easy to use application has proven elusive to many of the large healthcare IS vendors."

4D's intuitive interface has enabled Site of Care to rapidly provide system enhancements and to apply concepts directly from physician to application, continually meeting the market's changing needs.

For more information about Care Systems LLC, visit the Site of Care page.

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