Siemens Hearing Instruments
"Sybase's products and technical support have been wonderful. SQL Anywhere is a solid, reliable product. Most important, our customers, who are not computer science graduates, can operate and maintain it without a lot of training, which makes them very happy."
Todd Putvinski
Manager of R&D
Siemens
Siemens Hearing Instruments—the largest manufacturer of hearing aids in the U.S.—needed a comprehensive management system for hearing healthcare professionals working in distributed and mobile environments. Siemens implemented a software package from iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of Sybase, enabling them to run their practices efficiently and effectively. Business Advantage Key Benefits Sybase Technology Industry
A Comprehensive System—Value, Functionality and Support
More than 24 million Americans suffer from some form of hearing loss due to heredity, trauma, disease, advanced age or exposure to noise. Fortunately, many can be helped with hearing aids and other devices and treatments.
Siemens Hearing Instruments designs, engineers and manufactures state-of-the-art hearing aids in all custom models—enabling those with hearing loss to improve their quality of life.
To assist audiologists, physicians and hearing aid centers in better managing their practices, Siemens Hearing created Practice Navigator, a comprehensive, turnkey practice management system powered by SQL Anywhere Studio from Sybase's iAnywhere subsidiary.
Practice Navigator enables these hearing healthcare practitioners to keep track of information including patient, financial and product, while handling scheduling, billing and accounting functions. It also provides reporting and analysis functionality along with the ability to generate routine and marketing correspondence.
"Our challenge was to create an affordable, high-performing system that could support anywhere from one to 20 users in a single location," says Todd Putvinski, manager of R & D for Siemens. "We needed a database with a small footprint that could be easily installed and that would function robustly on a Windows 95/98 PC or NT server. It was also important that it not require a DBA on site.
"Finally, it had to support synchronization of data between customers' multiple office locations and practitioners who often spend a day or two each week on the road visiting nursing homes and other patient locations, entering data on their laptops. After reviewing a number of products including Oracle, Cloudscape and POET, we chose SQL Anywhere, concluding that it offered us the best value, functionality and support," Putvinski says.
Expertise for Synchronization
While Siemens had in-house database expertise, it needed assistance in designing and implementing the synchronization functionality. For that, Siemens engaged Sybase Professional Services.
"Sybase Professional Services' work, getting the synchronization piece of this application up and running, cut down on our learning curve and really helped us get this done more quickly than if we had tried to do it ourselves," Putvinski says. "In particular, they provided us with an infrastructure to enable the synchronization process to function transparently while providing administrative functionality such as auditing, error handling, tracking and reporting."
SQL Anywhere's synchronization capability enables Practice Navigator users to move data from one location to another very quickly and transparently. In the case of a practitioner returning from a visit to a nursing home, for example, this eliminates the need for an employee to transcribe or re-enter the information collected during that visit. Instead, the information can be synchronized with the central database easily and automatically.
Saving Time and Improving Patient Care
The Iowa Audiology and Hearing Center recently began using Practice Navigator and is already quite enthusiastic about it. The organization operates 10 clinics in Iowa, providing services to 2,000 active patients.
According to Amy Fields, director of operations, Practice Navigator is rock solid and offers much more functionality than the previous system. "Practice Navigator keeps track of a lot more information than our old system. It makes it easy to access up-to-date patient information, appointments, inventory information and a lot more.
"For instance, we used to keep track of hearing aids that were out for repair by writing the information on a board on the wall. Now all of that information is in Practice Navigator, and we can access it very quickly and easily. Plus, we can do much better reporting now. It used to take me two days a month to do our profit/loss financials, and now it's down to virtually no time at all. It's very user friendly," she says.
Practice Navigator is also helping improve patient care by keeping track of patient visits and when they are due for annual check-ups. "We used to have to bring in a temp to go through our files by hand, which took about two weeks," says Fields. "Now we can run a report and get that information in seconds."
Fields adds that the installation of the system was very easy. "I went through the manual and did it on my own following a basic orientation session with Siemens over the phone."
Looking to the Future: Product Internationalization and E-Commerce
As Siemens looks to the future, it is planning two more projects with Practice Navigator. First, since Siemens is a global company, it needs to internationalize the application. SQL Anywhere's support for Java-stored procedures and data types will make that process easier, according to Putvinski.
Siemens is also planning to add an e-commerce module to the application that will allow customers to check the status of product orders and billing online. "The hooks for this are in place, and we'll be using SQL Anywhere for this too," says Putvinski.
"One of our goals in creating Practice Navigator was to make it so easy for customers to interact with Siemens and to use Siemens products that they don't feel the need to go anywhere else," he says. "Sybase's products and technical support have been wonderful. SQL Anywhere is a solid, reliable product. Most importantly, our customers, who are not computer science graduates, can operate and maintain it without a lot of training, which makes them very happy."