Sharjah, Sep. 7, 2009 (WAM) -- H.H. Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council member, Ruler of Sharjah and Chancellor of the University of Sharjah (UoS) has signed here yesterday an agreement with InterSystems Corporation (ISC) to provide the new Sharjah Teaching Hospital with InterSystems TrakCare Health Information System.

John Mc Cormick, Chief Operations Officer of ISC, signed the agreement for his outfit in a ceremony which was attended by Dr. Hanif Hassan Ali, Minister of Health, Dr. Salah Tahir Al-hajj, UoS Deputy Director for Community Affairs and other senior health officials.

Following the signing the agreement, Sheikh Sultan underscored in a statement his deep commitment to make the state-of-the-art Sharjah Teaching Hospital one of the best of such facility offering world class healthcare services in the country and the region. He said the hospital, when it goes into operation, will be one of Sharjah's major components of medical excellence by combining medical services with teaching of medicine for the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacology, Health Sciences and Scientific Research of the University of Sharjah.

Based on the agreement, the TrakCare system will be used in all parts of the STH to allow all its medical doctors and specialists working in its laboratories to have easy access to instant medical information about a patient to expedite their action on the case. It will also ease and facilitate the admission and discharge procedure of patients from the 210-bed hospital, which is in the final phase of completion and is expected to receive the first patient in the second quarter of 2010.

Situated adjacent to the Medical and Health Sciences campus of the University of Sharjah, the Hospital will join the College of Medicine and the Sharjah Medical Research Institute of the Sharjah Medical Excellence Cluster. The three entities of the Cluster will give the residents of Sharjah, the UAE, and the region unique and unprecedented access to the leading medical experts and the latest developments in medical researchTrakCare, the leading web-based HIS, will be deployed in all operational areas of the Hospital.

The System will allow the clinicians and other medical staff immediate secured access to the seamless integrated electronic patient information from all of the Hospitals departments and laboratories, at all times. The System will also streamline all aspects of patients admissions and discharges through the online accurate processing of all the relevant information associated with each patient. Sharjahs investment in TrakCare is another demonstration of the Hospitals commitment to the development of the high quality environment that would support the delivery of the best possible healthcare services to the patients.

"From the very beginning of the this important project we have exerted every effort to ensure the realisation of His Highness vision for the Hospital to be the beacon for quality healthcare services in the region," said Dr. Amr Abdel-Hamid, Special Advisor to the Ruler of Sharjah, "The buildings are magnificent and the selected medical facilities are outstanding by all standards. Our team conducted a very thorough analysis of all the offers we received from the leading suppliers of patient management systems and found TrakCare to be the most appropriate for our needs. The signing of this agreement is the climax of the excellent work of many specialists, from both sides, to optimize the configuration of TrakCares modules and their interactions with other systems in the Hospital," added Dr. Abdel-Hamid.

"TrakCare and the associated infrastructure are additional examples of our resolve to use state-of-the-art technologies to support patient care, scientific research and the education and training of medical and health sciences students at the University of Sharjah," said Dr, Hossam Hamdi, Vice Chancellor for the Medical and Health Science Colleges at the University of Sharjah. "Our strategic imperative is to utilise the best available technologies to enable our clinical staff to provide high-quality healthcare services while maintaining the efficiency of our operations." Dr. Yaseen Hayajneh, Director of Information Technology at Sharjah Teaching Hospital added: "InterSystems TrakCare promises to improve patient outcomes and services by effectively and efficiently automating and streamlining hospital operations. It will have a major impact on processes such as results reporting and order entry as well as access to diagnostic images and patient information coupled with electronic documentation. In addition, it will lead to improved communication between clinical and administrative staff at the hospital. We look forward to the systems full implementation and reaping the benefits of this investment.""We are delighted to be chosen to provide the HIS for this prestigious project," confirmed Robert Long of InterSystems. "When we opened our offices in the UAE last year InterSystems took direct responsibility for negotiating with the client team at Sharjah Teaching Hospital. This was essential to properly share their vision, and we now look forward to continuing our work with their specialists to fully implement the System."InterSystems will work closely with the hospital team over the coming months to implement the solution. Sharjah Teaching Hospital has no legacy HIS systems, but still TrakCare will need to be integrated with other essential applications, including enterprise resource planning system, a document management system, a Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) and core back office applications.

This integration is key to realising one of the primary benefits of TrakCare: its detailed business intelligence and management information.

"TrakCare is renowned globally, and the business intelligence it provides helps hospitals improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency," Mr. Long said. "We believe this will be of significant value to Sharjah Teaching Hospital as it seeks to analyse its performance on clinical and administrative issues to improve care and optimise resources," he concluded.

Copyright Emirates News Agency (WAM) 2009.