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Swearingen Delivers a Healthy Solution for Healthcare
"We've depended on Pervasive technology for 20 years, and it's always worked for us. With its superior performance, reliability and low cost of ownership, it has met our needs so well that we've never had reason to try any other database solution."
Randall Swearingen, President & Founder, Swearingen Software, Inc.
About Swearingen Software, Inc.
From its founding in 1982 in Houston, Texas, Swearingen Software, Inc. has been a leader in the radiology information systems (RIS) industry. Research conducted by president and founder, Randall Swearingen, led to the discovery that all RIS packages were very expensive - far beyond the economic reach of most small and mid-size hospitals. Recognizing an opportunity to help these hospitals better manage their radiology departments, Swearingen set out to develop the first low-cost radiology management system, one specifically targeted to support smaller and mid-sized hospital radiology departments. The result was two innovative products, Swearingen's RMS for Windowsâ„¢ and RMSLite for Windowsâ„¢. Today, Swearingen Software is the only vendor who has specialized exclusively in RIS solutions for more than 19 years. Swearingen's RIS products have proven to be so reliable that they are no longer just for small facilities, as many large hospitals have since implemented these products as their RIS of choice.
Business Challenge
As healthcare technology advances, the industry demands that its software keep pace with the equipment that depends on it. With these technological advances comes an increase in data that is the lifeblood of radiology departments. Therefore, the reliability of that data must be ensured at all times. And for good reasons - the information created and managed by radiological organizations could mean the difference between life and death. According to Randall Swearingen, "For our customers, downtime is not an option when you're dealing with people's health. Expectations are high and if a software vendor wants to stay in the game, it must consistently meet them."
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) adds further challenges for healthcare vendors. It includes new security regulations for healthcare providers that require physical, administrative and technical safeguards of protected health information. In order to meet the requirements of the technical safeguards, applications must provide the ability to set access authorizations, provide emergency data access and provide auditing of who, what, where and when data was accessed to enforce privacy and security. "To be a viable software provider for the healthcare industry, we must enable our clients to meet or even exceed HIPAA requirements. It's not an option for them, and it's certainly not an option for us," Swearingen said.
Swearingen is a relatively small software company that has to compete head-to-head with some large players. It is imperative that Swearingen meet the high demands of its customer base and gain a competitive edge where it can, through functionality, reliability and cost.
The Pervasive Solution
Like many software vendors, Swearingen has been relying on the technology behind Pervasive since the company's beginning. Swearingen explained, "In 1984, I was a mainframe programmer. When I started my company, Btrieve was the only database for the PC environment that was as reliable and easy to use as a mainframe IMS database engine. It was a completely natural transition for me. Since then we've followed Btrieve throughout its evolution to the current version of Pervasive.SQL which continues to improve in terms of performance and dependability."
Built on Pervasive's database, Swearingen's RMS and RMSLite product lines are the radiology management systems of choice for more than 200 hospitals with some sites performing over 120,000 exams per year. RMS helps radiology departments better manage their resources and automate patient management, film tracking, scheduling, transcription, inventory, quality control, standard procedures, equipment maintenance and personnel management. With help from Pervasive, dependability, easy installation and low maintenance of these solutions are an essential part of their desirability. "We charge a relatively low support fee," Swearingen said. "So it's very important that we're able to install the software quickly and effectively with as little follow-up maintenance as possible. Pervasive enables us to do this and as a result, keep the costs down, which is important to our smaller clients."
Although the cost of the solution is much lower than the competition, Swearingen is quick to point out that the features are not. "Our product features go head-to-head with and even exceed the most expensive rival solutions with functionality such as biometric fingerprint login," Swearingen stated. "The Pervasive database engine also provides performance and up-time levels that are simply phenomenal."
Swearingen is also proud of his company's role in assisting healthcare organizations meet HIPAA requirements to safeguard patient records, with minimal financial impact. Swearingen elaborated, "Pervasive's AuditMaster will give our customers total knowledge of their database. It will track every time a record is modified, even slightly, such as what was changed, by whom and when." This function is beneficial from a software vendor standpoint, as well. "We will soon have total auditability of our solution," Swearingen said. "If an upset client calls asking what happened to a certain record, thinking it is a software problem, we can tell them who at their organization last accessed it and what they did. Unfortunately, when it was a mystery before, our software was blamed. Soon we'll be able to prove that our software is functioning properly and help the customer identify usage problems and training opportunities."
Bottom Line
Since 1989, Swearingen Software has been consistently ranked in the top 10 RIS vendors. Swearingen explained why, "With Pervasive we are able to provide a best-in-class, scalable radiology information system that is affordable to own and maintain, especially for mid-sized hospitals that are cost conscious and committed to delivering the best available healthcare."
One such client, and one of its largest, is George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. "RMS has been a valuable productivity tool in our hospital for the past four years, and I expect it to play an even larger role in our new facility, such as interfacing our PACS system with RMS. The best part about RMS is that the software has grown with us. We identify our needs, and Swearingen Software has almost always accommodated most of our requests. RMS does not sit still. It grows as our needs grow," stated Edie Cawley, ancillary system coordinator for RMS at George Washington University Hospital.
With the latest versions of its product lines, downtime has almost become a thing of the past, with less than half a day a year. Even an unload/reload, which could take days on other vendors' solutions, is completed within minutes, causing no noticeable lag in system performance. Swearingen concluded with an analogy, "In our industry, you could say that we are David versus Goliath. David wasn't as big as his competitor but in the end, his performance proved him to be superior. Pervasive is the stone that's enabling us to bring down the giant, and the result is an affordable, high-performance solution for our clients that helps them help others."
About Pervasive Software®
Pervasive Software is a leading global data management company powering the success of application developers by providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administration costs. Pervasive's strength is evidenced by the size and diversity of its customer base, serving tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of thousands of end-users in nearly every vertical market around the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products into more than 150 countries and is based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Europe.
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.
