Monitoring the usability of data systems

Monitoring the usability of data systems

HUS, The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa consists of 24 hospitals and several other units, all of which together use more than 15,000 workstations.

Qentinel, in cooperation with HUS Tietohallinto (data unit of HUS), designed an automatic service, which monitors the nursing staff that uses the patient information system at work. The monitor measures the duration of patient information searches and gives an alarm if a search is slowed down in any HUS unit within the scope of the service.

Search times are important, not only for smooth workflow, but for finances. An enormous number of searches are made every minute. Even changes of a few seconds multiply drastically in the impact on working hours. Earlier the administrators measured search times by using a stopwatch.

Top-level monitoring is important in clinical work

Without any independent application-level monitoring, not all changes causing problems could be detected or added to statistical information. The visual design of the monitoring solution is built to be illustrative and intuitive and it has received plenty of positive feedback. The visual runs continuously on a large screen in the IT support centre, where they can obtain the search time information automatically and in real-time.