Hospital San Sebastián 

Hospital San Sebastián

“Pervasive.SQL drives a patient record management system that has reduced patient waiting times and administrative red tape with by at least 80%.”

Fermín Lazpiur, Information Systems Manager, Hospital San Sebastián de Écija

About Hospital San Sebastián Hospital San Sebastián is located in Écija, an Andalusian town housing some 70,000 inhabitants. The hospital, despite being integrated in the Andalusian public government health system, has adopted a private business model for an optimal management. Last year, the hospital was awarded the prize for Best Hospital in its category by IASIST, the international organization specialized in health consultancy.

Founded in 1837, the hospital employs 250 people who manage around 45,000 emergency cases and 125,000 ordinary consultations per year. In addition, Hospital San Sebastián earned a solid reputation in surgery with more than 5,000 surgical operations in 2002.

Business Challenge

The increasing patient volume in the hospital during the last couple of years has been a catalyst for a new – digitalised – patient management system.

“The transformation of our centre into a fully digitalised hospital was initialised in the 90s. We are now adding the last bricks to it,” explains Fermín Lazpiur, Information Systems Manager at Hospital San Sebastián.

The project focused on the installation of an automated patient record management system which would allow easy information access for all hospital staff members. The system was named GIHOS.

Based on Pervasive.SQLTM, GIHOS is a complete suite of interrelated software applications which constitute the foundation of all services offered to patients. It manages waiting lists, appointments, hospitalisations, analytics information, pathological anatomy information, surgical planning, etc.

Pervasive.SQL as the Business Solution

Lazpiur met with Pervasive Software for the first time in the early’ 90s when he was a consultant at Dimoni Software, a company supplying ERP solutions based on Pervasive.SQL.

When he held responsibility for GIHOS at Hospital San Sebastián – first as an external consultant, later in-house - Lazpuir reckoned he would need a data management tool that would offer speed, performance and last but not least flawless backward compatibility with earlier versions, as he estimated the time necessary to complete the project would be five years. With the experience gained, Lazpuir’s choice obviously fell on Pervasive.SQL. In 1997, the hospital adopted Pervasive.SQL as the backbone of its information system.

The database management system was acquired through Danysoft, one of Pervasive’s Spanish resellers.

Today, more than a hundred users have simultaneous access to approximately 5 million patient records managed by Pervasive, without a decrease in performance levels.

GIHOS runs on NetWare 5.1, as the platform helps to ensure high stability and availability. Since 2000, all applications have been developed with Visual Studio tools, mainly Visual Basic 6.0.

“Pervasive.SQL is critical for our organisation. It manages the records of all our patients, currently 79,000, and allows information to be exchanged and coordinated among the different health departments across the hospital,” says Lazpiur.

“Pervasive.SQL, being open technology, gives us a high level of freedom over platforms used. We can at any time migrate our applications to any other platform without incurring huge costs. We are satisfied with Pervasive Software in such a way that we are now considering the purchase of Pervasive DataExchange for disaster recovery,” adds Lazpiur.

Among the main features of Pervasive.SQL, most credit is given to its backward compatibility with older versions; an asset which saves effort and costs each time the system needs upgrading. Also important, is Pervasive.SQL’s excellent cost/performance ratio. It was calculated that the total cost of ownership associated with Pervasive.SQL represents only 5% of their total budget, whereas TCO analyses of competing databases represent 15% to 35%. Lazpiur explains, “Although our choice has given priority to performance, the cost is also important. Thanks to its easy integration, low administration, low cost of ownership, smooth migration and performance, Pervasive.SQL represents the best solution that we could think of.”

Bottom Line

GIHOS has given the medical staff direct access to medical information, from wherever and whenever. The impact on customers is showing: shorter waiting times for consultations and less red tape. The system with Pervasive.SQL at the core, lets patients save around 80% of their time in comparison with other hospitals using traditional patient record management systems.

For more information

To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.