In his 2004 State of the Union Address, President Bush issued an executive order mandating that all U.S. healthcare organizations computerize their health records to “avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve care” by 2014. As a result, hospitals across the nation are turning to leading software and services firm The Sham’s Group (TSG) to convert their bulky paperwork into efficient electronic health records.  

TSG has nearly two decades of experience and has worked with more than 400 hospitals worldwide. “We have continually led the healthcare marketplace with IT innovations that enhance patient safety, care process, data quality, enterprise-wide integration and business intelligence,” the Coppell, Texas, company says, adding that its solutions stretch across every context of healthcare.   

“We offer an identity management solution to securely bring order to duplicate and disjointed medical records,” it says. “Our fully interoperable paperless medical record and hospital information management solutions allow hospitals to create the most robust legal electronic medical records.    

“Business offices and finance are redefining efficiency through our paperless registration, revenue cycle and denial management, paperless accounts payable and materials management, and business intelligence innovations,” it continues. “Medical dictation, transcription and outsourcing are made easy through our e-transcription solutions. We’ve even enhanced the lab and pharmacy workflow with our laboratory outreach portal and medication order management solutions.”

Company Built on Service
TSG was founded in 1989 by President Kam Shams, who started the company after working as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for California-based Memorial Hospital Association. When working as the CIO, he selected MEDITECH as the hospital’s information systems vendor. “We became a reference site for MEDITECH between 1986 and 1989, and many hospitals would come to our hospital to see the product before they bought the software,” Shams recalls.   

“Many of the hospitals saw how we were using the product, but when they did their own implementation, they did not have similar success with it. So, I started TSG as a consulting company truly focused on being a hospital information systems vendor. We started helping hospitals integrate MEDITECH and other vendor applications and people really liked our work.”   

Sham credits the company’s initial success to his own user background as a former IT director. He knew exactly what a hospital’s management would expect from an IT system and “that resulted in us moving slowly into software,” he says. “We wanted to see where healthcare would be 10 years from now and identified two focus areas – electronic health records and advanced clinical. We said, ‘In order to do that, it’s going to cost about $25 million in R&D and require a global footprint.’”    

TSG committed the funds and developed its strategy and has grown rapidly ever since. Today, the company has a reached its goal of having a global footprint, with offices across North America and Asia. “We have built a service organization – one that is extremely knowledge-based – and we’ve done that with internal software,” Shams explains. “We can respond 24/7/365 in ways that very few companies can.”

Four Business Areas
TSG focuses on four core competencies: business intelligence, electronic health records, business process management and integration solutions. The company offers business intelligence solutions to automate day-to-day hospital information systems. “Most hospital information systems are good transaction orientators, but they are not analytical orientators,” Shams points out.    

“Most are designed to get the day-to-day business done and automate them. Hospitals have mounds of data trapped in this system, but if you want to do real-time reporting – if you want to know if something is going wrong – these systems are not designed to do that at a DNA level. We offer a data warehouse and provide business intelligence tools. We bring data in near real-time and consolidate information. We provide all of these things in gauges, bars, pie charts and easy-to-view spreadsheets.”  

Because the Bush Administration mandated all health records go electronic by 2014, the electronic health record portion of TSG’s business has skyrocketed. “Our No. 1 sale is our electronic health record, because it has such a great impact on the bottom line,” Shams says. “We have created one of the best electronic health record applications that’s legal evidentiary centric and clinician centric. It’s very easy for return on investments and also for the care process, so it’s a win-win for the hospitals.”  

TSG’s business process management applications allow hospitals to automate paperwork within many departments. “Everywhere you go there is paper,” Shams says. “We have workflow software that routes documents. This allows you to digitally document from one person to another based on requirement and automate not only the clinical area, but non-clinical or non-core areas, such as HR, general accounting or engineering. We have the business process management and workflow software to automate paper and workflow to increase efficiency across the organization.”   

When Shams first started the company, he noticed that many clients were complaining that they could not integrate their hospital information systems at a workflow level with other systems they already had. While the other IT systems vendors were “not cooperative” in making these systems work cohesively, Shams says TSG took a different approach. “We said, ‘Hey hospital, you can buy anybody’s system and if they can’t talk to each other, we will do it for you,’” he recalls.    

“And that’s hard. Integration is very challenging. But we take responsibility so that there is no risk involved to the customer. If you don’t integrate, then these systems are not going to work well. We call this, ‘Interoperability.’ It means everything needs to talk to everything at the application and workflow level. We are masters of integration and synchronization.”