ATLANTA – Hospitals don’t always know where their patients are – a situation that can prove costly in both financial and clinical terms. With that in mind, StatCom has launched a technology platform designed to give providers a complete view of the patient from admission to discharge.

The Hospital Operating System, unveiled Monday by the Atlanta-based subsidiary of Jackson Healthcare, “is the missing gear that will keep everything in the hospital running smoothly,” said Bob Schlotman, the company’s vice president of marketing.

“Hospitals today are silos of information that aren’t always connected,” he said. “What StatCom does is kind of layer a horizontal view of administration … synchronizing the delivery of healthcare in the hospital.”

Company officials describe the Hospital Operating System is an administrative tool that doesn’t store data, but compiles it for a real-time view of all clinical and financial systems. According to Schlotman, the platform “replaces whiteboards, greaseboards and bedboards that just tell you where the patient is going to be sleeping tonight, not where the patient is now.”

“We’re trying to eliminate a lot of phone calls,” he added.

The system has proven effective at Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio, part of the Mercy Health Partners network. Hospital officials say the technology, in use for the past year at Mercy St. Vincent and more recently rolled out to other hospitals in the system, has helped reduce the time a patient needs to stay in the hospital, thereby reducing expenses for both the hospital and the patient, as well as helping to improve the quality of care by making sure treatment is delivered to the patient in a timely and effective manner.

“The StatCom solution is a huge step forward in helping Mercy Health Partners facilities, such as Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, improve patient flow and reduce inherent delays in the patient care process,” said Samantha M. Platzke, MHP’s senior vice president and chief financial and transformation officer. “Mercy St. Vincent has reduced their average length of stay by 14 percent and their direct expenses by $8.6 million in just 12 months.”

Schlotman said the Hospital Operating System is a broad, enterprise-wide platform designed to accommodate as many users as possible, with information displayed on a real-time dashboard for administrative use. Access is determined by administration, and the system can be implemented in parts in as little as four months or as whole in about six months.

The system is designed for hospitals with 300 beds or more, with hundreds of users and an average length of stay of five days. Schlotman said StatCom is working on enhancing the system to manage patient milestones and alerts, and future versions might incorporate staffing and supply chain services as well as the operating room and emergency departments.

“Our continued growth, despite the economic climate, emphasizes the need that hospitals have to maximize existing capacity and resources by being more efficient,” said Ben Sawyer, StatCom’s executive vice president of client services. “Our customers needed a dramatic increase in efficiency that existing bed management offerings can’t provide. We designed the StatCom solution to deliver ‘game changing’ reductions in length of stay by substantially increasing the efficiency of patient flow, systems and information.”