Healthcare provision for Olympics
One thing the organisers of the 2012 Olympics won’t want to overlook
is a suitable facility for healthcare provision within the Olympic
village, and they may well wish to learn from experiences at the Athens
Games.
Every athlete attending the games in London’s East End has been
promised a bed in the Olympic village, which could represent a weighty
healthcare commitment. In Athens in 2004, a fully fledged, purpose-built
hospital handled well over 7,000 medical encounters during the course of
the Games, mostly involving athletes or mission members.
The hospital, known as the Olympic Polyclinic, boasted a total of 17
working departments, including a full biological laboratory, CT, MRI,
ultra-sound and digital xray facilities.
The clinic was based around a hospital information system called
MedTrak, developed by TrakHealth and based on InterSystems’ Caché
database. The system was implemented and operated by Athens-based
healthcare IT specialists International Online (IOL).
IOL imported a significant amount of data relating to the athletes
into the MedTrak system, which was provided in a proprietary format, and
rapidly taught 667 volunteers how to use the system and how to work
effectively in a paperless environment.
The clinic was a great success. It opened at 8.00 and closed at 23.00
each day. The number of medical encounters ranged from 200 at the
quietest times to around 450 at the busiest. The emergency department
was open 24 hours a day.
According to IOL’s Managing Director, Paris Marinakis: “One of the
most critical aspects of the project was the need to deal with
significant quantities of external data from a broad range of external
sources such as databases, spreadsheets and text files.”
Source: bjhc&im October 2005
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