Physicians can't wait a half-minute or more for pertinent data, like lab results, to appear on a computer screen. Performance management tools can help ensure that doctors have reliable and fast access to data whenever they need it.

Providence Health & Services, a nonprofit integrated health delivery system based in Renton, Wash., which operates 27 hospitals in several states, is rolling out Compuware's Electronic Health Records Service Delivery products to help boost performance of e-medical records and other clinical systems used in the organization's Washington Region. That region includes three hospitals and several clinics where Providence employs 10,000 workers, including 7,500 clinicians.

Providence Health & Services currently uses clinical applications, including e-medical records, from various vendors, said Curt Kwak, CIO of Providence Health & Services' Washington Region. However, unfortunately, sometimes there are "systems performance challenges" that require "fixes" so that the clinical applications run smoothly and data is available quickly when doctors need it, Kwak said.

Among the system and application issues Providence Health & Services clinicians report are slow response times when trying to access patient data or scheduling information via Providence's physician portal, said Kwak.

"Doctors can't wait 15 to 30 seconds or more to access data -- that might prolong a patient's suffering" as well as disrupt the workflow and business of healthcare, he said.

Until recently, when doctors or other clinicians reported performance issues it could sometimes take Providence Health & Services IT staff "weeks or months" to identify the root of the problem, such as whether it's a specific server or network point that needs to be corrected, he said.

However, with Compuware's EHR Service Delivery products -- part of Compuware's Vantage application performance management offering -- Providence Health & Services is already seeing improvement in the time it takes to identify and address issues, based on a pilot rollout that started last year, said Kwak in an interview with InformationWeek.

IT staff "saw the benefits right away, being able to drill down" to identify the cause for issues, said Kwak. That includes problems related to IT infrastructure and "all the way down to code level" issues, he said. That means issues can be identified and fixed "in days, not weeks and months," he said.

Improved systems and application performance will be increasingly important for Providence Health & Services moving forward, said Kwak. That's because a new computerized physician order entry system, from McKesson, is being rolled out in coming months, he said.

"The Vantage product will provide a lot of the visibility [into performance] that we'll need moving ahead," Kwak said. "We don't want to compound issues" when Providence adds its new CPOE system, he said. Rather, the new Compuware tools are providing an avenue to improve performance of existing clinical applications before new ones are rolled out, he said.

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