Health & Pharmaceuticals

Events such as natural disasters, pandemics, bio-terrorism, food sabotage, and mass-casualty emergencies have become more prevalent over recent years, putting greater pressure on the healthcare system and underscoring the need for effective and efficient tools for tracking and responding to such events.

Noggin's OCA solutions are used by a number of different healthcare organisatons to support their operations during such crises. Whether its a medical response to major hazards where incidents are partially forseen or unforseen, a minor incident response where automation of procedures can be planned and enacted, or OHS&E incidents in the healthcare environment, OCA can assist the following:

Public health
Ambulance services
Major healthcare incident controllers
First responders in healthcare
Contract healthcare organisations that provide contract medical services to events, corporations and the public sector

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Planned events where health services plays a role	Planned events and other major public events can have many types of incidents, be they major or minor. Healthcare professionals are often at the front line in such events. OCA allows you to plan for these events: using the asset and mapping features, you can assign enter and track resources, and manage incidents in real time. Workers in the field can use the OCA mobile interface to share information quickly and to manage and report back on tasks, the situation or the status of incidents.
Resource availability such as hospital bed availability	OCA's asset management functionality can be used to create information about hospital bed availability. Hospital assets can be configured to show how many beds (or any other resources) are available at any time. This tool can assist with assessing which hospital a casualty or patient should be sent to. Direct access to enter resource details can easily be given to hospitals allowing for real-time updates, ensuring that decisions are made with the best available information.
Patient and case management	Patients can be entered as cases within the OCA, and associated with incidents. Users of the OCA can configure the system quickly and easily to input any information about the patient, and capture all relevant documents, contacts, locations and images in a single place. Patients can be assigned to hospitals, or have resources (ambulances, health equipment, healthcare) assigned to them. OCA can also handle GIS tracking tools so you can see where patients or resources are at any given point in time.
Alerting	The OCA alerting platform is totally integrated in OCA. Throughout OCA, you can send information via the OCA Communication gateway via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML - conforming with the CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) standard. Send out public health warnings, co-ordinate evacuations of hospitals, keep key stakeholders informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications around health related emergency plans or operating procedures. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools.
Resource planning, tracking and CAD integration	The OCA asset and request for assistance modules can be used to allocate any resources to incidents be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Not only can you assign resources to your own staff within the system, but you can also send external requests for assistance to third party agencies using the OCA communications gateway. Resources can be tracked and allocated in many ways - geographical, by resource availability, by capability, by type, by cost. You can also enter costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily track the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. The OCA Designer tool allows you to create new asset categories on the fly. While OCA is not designed to replace a CAD system, the OCA Connect tool has been designed to take information from a CAD system. In the event of a major incident where you need to know how many people are affected, how many calls, requests for assistance you are getting from the CAD, the OCA can provide you with high level summaries of the situation updated in real time.
Security	Security is key in sharing health related information, particularly in relation to privacy. The OCA Incident Manager is the only incident management product in the world to have the highly sought after, internationally recognised EAL2+ security rating. Not many Australian companies submit their software to this sort of scrutiny, but Noggin spent over 12 months getting OCA certified by the Defence Signals Directorate to this level. Our multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu, with data centres that meet the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Sharing information with other agencies or organisations	Health issues don't conform to geographical or jurisdiction borders. Many health incidents have multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional implications. The OCA Connect tool allows you to share any piece of information (events, assets, resources, contacts, reports etc) with other relevant stakeholders, providing rich information securely and in real time. OCA Connect is also a directory service that connects other agencies with each other in a highly intelligent and automated way. Plus you can share information between OCA or non-OCA systems via our open architecture.
Target People in the field - get geospatial and mobile	Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. The OCA geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communications to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key healthcare workers in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders. The Mobile interface and iphone/ipad application also allow you to target people.
Crisis severity	OCA deals with different levels of crises, and can be easily configured to match your crisis matrix. When a health incident moves from low to high severity, you can use the workflow tool to send communications out to staff and get them in to work on the incident, quickly and efficiently.
Case management	OCA allows you to create cases or import them from other systems. If you have an incident, and you need to track or monitor people (say in the event of a major hazard or pandemic), or you need to allocate cases to external resources such as hospitals, or other agencies, the case management tool allows you to do this.