NRG Global teams with  UAMS

Collaborates with the university’s Medical Sciences Center on new QA solutions for Healthcare apps. 

NRG Global collaborates with University of Arkansas Medical Sciences on performance management solutions for Healthcare apps.

CHICAGO, IL (HIMSS09) – March 31, 2009 -- NRG Global, a technology leader in application performance management, announced that they are collaborating with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in order to improve visibility into the performance of clinical healthcare information systems.

Hospitals, medical centers, and other healthcare providers increasingly rely on technology to coordinate activities, increase patient safety, streamline workflows, and improve communication and access to data throughout the care continuum. However, traditional network monitoring tools fail to provide the needed insight to properly understand how critical clinical technology applications are performing every day.

At HIMSS, NRG Global is launching AppsWatch Healthcare and AppLoader Healthcare to directly address this challenge and give healthcare providers unparalleled visibility into the performance of these critical information systems – such as leading applications from Eclipsys, Cerner, McKesson, Meditech, GE Healthcare, and Epic.

Throughout the development, NRG Global worked closely with UAMS to ensure that AppsWatch and AppLoader support realistic hospital workflows and meet the real world needs of healthcare organizations worldwide. UAMS played an instrumental role during the development, providing a test environment and giving key feedback on features.

“We’d hear complaints about slow response times from end users – for example from staff in the pharmacy department. However, having to rely on end users to report issues is spotty at best. It would be difficult to gather sufficient details surrounding the complaint, and trying to locate the source of the problem typically entailed days of consultation with several departments and multiple vendors,” said Robert Goodhand, Director of Special Projects, Information Technology at UAMS. “We found we weren’t able to react effectively to performance issues, much less be proactive about them.”

UAMS is not the only organization with limited tools to proactively detect and resolve performance degradation before end users are impacted. According to Forrester Research, 73 percent of performance issues are first reported by end users. And industry benchmarks show that 80 percent of the time required to fix a problem is spent on finding the right problem area.

NRG Global’s AppsWatch Healthcare offers a unique front-end approach that monitors an application’s performance from an end user’s perspective. The software tool measures application availability and response times throughout each stage of a typical process – for example a patient admission in the Emergency Department, a pharmacy order and verification, and a physician accessing a patient’s medical history and blood work results. The software proactively identifies any slowness in response times and degradation in performance before productivity, quality of care, and patient safety are impacted.

Additionally, AppLoader Healthcare simulates real user load activity for healthcare applications to verify that a new or upgraded application meets expected performance requirements before it is brought into a live environment.

“We were extremely interested to work with NRG Global, since the impact of slow performance can be significant – whether it takes longer for a respiratory therapist to pull up a patient’s chart or for a pharmacist to verify a medication order,” continued Goodhand. “We’re training for a paper-lite environment and technology has become an increasingly important part of patient care. And any time the expected process gets disturbed, say by a slower response time, patient safety can be compromised.”  

NRG Global will be demonstrating several test scenarios developed in conjunction with UAMS at the NRG Global booth (8133) at the HIMSS09 Conference in Chicago from April 4-8.

About NRG Global
NRG Global is a technology leader in availability monitoring and performance diagnostics of business applications and IT systems. We help companies maximize the performance and ensure the availability of their mission-critical applications. Founded in 2000, NRG Global is headquartered in Pasadena, California and is privately held. For more information about our company and products, please visit us on the Web at www.nrgglobal.com.

AppsWatch and AppLoader are registered trademarks of NRG Global. Other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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