Sparrow Health System Wins Software Innovation Award

Sparrow Health System (www.sparrow.org) has received an award for its adaptation of scheduling software that has streamlined hospital operations -- saving time, hassles and money.

"e-signs" is a system developed by Lansing-based i2Integration (www.i2integration.com) to provide real-time scheduling for conference rooms throughout Sparrow Health System and integrates with the widely-used TempusOne enterprise-wide scheduling software (www.tempus.com).

Sparrow recently was named the people's choice award-winner for "Innovative Use for TempusOne." A TempusOne official said e-signs "truly took the product usage to new heights. This was the first we had heard of a hospital utilizing the product to display conference room schedules."

This was the ninth year of the Tempus awards. Sparrow was chosen from a pool of four nominees.

I2Integration is a premier developer of Internet, Intranet and Extranet solutions for healthcare organizations. The company also handles Sparrow's website, database integration, enterprise-wide Intranet capabilities, content management systems and custom applications that also have received national recognition.

e-signs works by allowing Sparrow employees to more effectively manage the scheduling of the health system's conference rooms in several locations throughout Lansing.

John Forsberg, CEO of i2Integration said, “before e-signs, Sparrow employees printed out the daily schedule and drove the printouts to some 20 locations, placing them on the doors of each conference room -- a time consuming and often confusing task, especially with last-minute schedule changes. Our goal was to eliminate the confusion and labor for Sparrow.”

With e-signs, scheduling data now is captured from Sparrow's TempusOne Scheduling Server and sent electronically -- via Sparrow's intranet network -- to each conference room.

A small, hidden, networked computer with a flat-screen monitor on the wall of each conference room door displays the day's events, which is automatically updated every 10 minutes -- no more printouts, and no more drive time.

Joe Denslow, Sparrow's manager of central scheduling, said e-signs has "certainly streamlined all our processes," not to mention the savings in employee time and wages.

"It's taken the technology to get these things to people in real time where we were never able to do that before," he said. "The great thing about it is it's across the entire health system -- it has affected about 3,000 computer users in our systems, and we plan to make it available to patients and visitors who come to our conference rooms."

Additional services provided to Sparrow Health System by i2Integration include graphic design, programming, database integration, consulting, clergy notification and i2ools, a content management system that allows Sparrow personnel to update the system without having to rely on outsourcing.