The Hospital Information Systems (HIS) had previously been maintained on a SharePoint environment and was difficult to coordinate with various entities in the District in case of an emergency. V-ETS created a platform where data can be shared across different Healthcare Organizations in real-time, which made the response time decrease exponentially. HIS was built to support information sharing during emergency events and for handling day to day data transmission across different agencies. It gathered real-time information on availability of resources across the district like bed count in hospitals, blood availability and so forth.
The MOST automated system captures patients’ wishes for end-of-life medical intervention. It will form part of the IT ecosystem that includes key IT systems from the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Administration (HEPRA) such as Patient Tracking, Trauma Registry and the Hospital Information System (HIS). The MOST form was previously in a non-digital, printed version that patients had to carry around on their person in the event of an emergency. V-ETS played a key role in digitizing this document so that it captured data included on the District’s approved MOST form which is used to identify a patient’s choice for medical interventions in consultation with his or her Authorized Healthcare Professional, as specified in the form. The MOST registry was built on a secure and efficient online platform that will enable health professionals to view the patient’s end-of-life treatment preferences and to ensure that private and identifiable information is safeguarded and that the system is in compliance with the relevant security standards.
The District of Columbia passed the “Death with Dignity Act of 2016” (DC Law 21-182). The Death with Dignity Act provides for District of Columbia residents, qualified with a terminal disease, to die in a humane and peaceful manner through the voluntary use of prescribed medications. The DWD forms were manually filled and submitted to doctors and had to be moved across several physicians and pharmacies to obtain signatures. V-ETS automated and digitized this process so that the forms could be filled as well as signed online. This significantly reduced the processing time.
The Department of Health issued a turnkey upgrade requirement for Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Administration (HEPRA) to provide all design, logistics, and operational technical expertise required to complete the DOH upgrade. This includes services for planning, design, development, testing, maintenance and support of an electronic registry and web portal for several applications.
As a part of its mission, HEPRA was to be prepared to execute its health emergency support operations on a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week schedule, many times with no notice to prepare or “ramp up” to meet the demands of the emergency medical crisis or other significant event that is occurring within the District. To respond to such a crisis in a more efficient manner, HEPRA routinely accounts for a myriad of medical and non-medical emergencies.
In order to support HEPRA’s mission, Virtual Emerging Technology Solutions (V-ETS) built the emergency command Center (HECC) to coordinate the emergency preparedness across the district. The HECC was built with high-end innovative technologies and equipment to support the above requirements. V-ETS built the following applications and infrastructure components to facilitate communications and enable ease of use across platforms.
To support DOH’s efforts to consolidate enterprise applications V-ETS provided Cloud platforms to enable efficient management and usage of resources across the enterprise. The goal of this effort was to use Hosted and or Hybrid Enterprise solutions to Enhance the End-User Computing Experience by upgrading network bandwidth and throughput to Trusted Dedicated Internet Connection (TDIC) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). This effort also included Data Center consolidation of current campus resources. This effort provided DOH with stronger security, centralized operations and reduced hosting costs as there was minimal hardware that was required to provision these environments and modernize the infrastructure. V-ETS also provisioned first 10G Enterprise Gateway to the provisioned Hybrid Cloud infrastructure across Oracle Cloud and AWS, with high availability and data driven support for mass emergency communication, collaboration, video and telecommunications.
DC Law Library hosts the necessary data for lawyers, health practitioners and judges to learn more about emergency preparedness in case of a disaster. V-ETS designed, developed and deployed the website and continues to maintain it.
PHDL is a digital Library that includes all data pertaining to Public Health resources like journals, articles and manuals that can be publicly accessed. V-ETS played a role in the development of this system and hosts the system and its components.