Medical City and Allocade to deploy their On-Cue software solution at Medical City Dallas Hospital

Oct 8 2009

Medical City and Allocade, Inc., a developer of innovative healthcare software solutions, today announced the first deployment of the On-Cue™ system in Texas. On-Cue is a revolutionary software solution that utilizes artificial intelligence to automate patient flow throughout the hospital and improve operational efficiencies by creating a dynamic patient itinerary. As a result, all the different departments within Medical City will have a common view of each patient's daily itinerary, which will be adjusted in real-time as variables change throughout the day.

"We are constantly looking at new technologies for all of our hospitals to improve workflow and the overall patient experience," said Stan Seremet, CIO, North Texas Division, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). "The new On-Cue system addresses these objectives by providing a layer of intelligence over our existing IT systems to ensure that all departments are coordinated and operate smoothly. We believe the On-Cue system will help us to realize efficiency gains throughout Medical City as well as positively impact operating margins."

Hospitals are constantly dealing with unpredictable and unplanned changes that affect every department in the hospital, including Radiology, Cardiology, Surgery, Nursing, Transport, the Emergency Department and more. Ensuring smooth patient flow in light of these occurrences can be a monumental challenge for hospitals.

The On-Cue system was designed to minimize the impact of unpredictable disruptions in scheduling across the hospital by streamlining coordination and communications amongst all caregivers. Utilizing artificial intelligence algorithms, On-Cue creates what is called a patient itinerary, or a dynamic orchestration of each patient's resource plan of care. This itinerary is a dynamic tool, which is created for inpatients, outpatients and emergency department patients. The itinerary is continually adjusted in real-time as conditions change and it communicates to all caregivers instantaneously.

"We immediately understood the benefits of On-Cue and how it could positively impact the patient experience," said Dr. Britt Berrett, CEO of Medical City. "Because On-Cue offers a powerful enterprise solution that runs almost like an air traffic controller, it keeps patient activity on track across all departments. As a result, patients benefit from a smoother experience and Medical City benefits from improved utilization of existing resources."

The genesis of the On-Cue technology comes from NASA, where Allocade's Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Don Rosenthal, led the Artificial Intelligence Applications Group at the NASA Ames Research Center. The underlying On-Cue engine is the result of Rosenthal's work to optimally utilize the limited resources on the Hubble Space Telescope. The implementation of On-Cue is straightforward and the time to value ratio is very favorable because the software leverages the information already available in Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Radiology Information Systems (RIS) and Electronic Medical Record Systems (EMR).

"As a part of our commitment to our fiscal responsibility, we are always looking for innovative and effective ways to improve our bottom line," said Scott Schmidly, COO of Medical City. "On-Cue provides us with a solution that will recommend the best course of action in real-time, enabling us to optimize our resources. By streamlining coordination and communication between our departments, we believe we can generate real costs savings which can do nothing but provide greater benefits to our patients and our organization," continued Schmidly.

The On-Cue software solution will be installed at Medical City Dallas Hospital in the fourth quarter of 2009.