Managing an individual's medical needs on the outside is hard enough. But in a busy, high-volume corrections environment, managing offender medical issues presents challenges that can strain any staff. To ensure the offender receives the right treatment .

1. Syscon Justice Systems Fall 2011
WHITEPAPER
ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS
INTEGRATION WITH CORRECTIONS
CASE MANAGEMENT
© 2009-2011 Syscon Justice Systems. All Rights Reserved.

2. EHR / JMS Integration 2
Introduction
Best practices in the Corrections industry have developed over decades to incorporate the
concept of a single unified record for each offender; a unique case file that includes the
complete and detailed history of an offender’s relationship with a corrections agency. It is
through this consolidated view of an offender that line officers and case workers concerned with
all aspects of security – inmate, staff and public – develop a knowledge and understanding of the
individual inmate.
That an inmate’s medical and treatment history should be a part of this unified record is ever
more important in an age of increasingly complex health records’ legislation, an aging and
sickening inmate population, constantly increasing health care costs, and the ongoing threat of
inmate lawsuits.
To meet this need, Syscon has developed a sophisticated and corrections-specific Electronic
Health Records (EHR) system that is fully integrated within our comprehensive Jail Management
solution. Syscon’s Elite EHR comes with industry-leading ease-of-use features and yet is
efficiently designed with advanced methodologies to meet your current and evolving medical
management, reporting and privacy requirements.
Single Data Entry and Intake Processing
The Elite EHR system has been developed specifically for corrections agencies. As a result, all
aspects of the system are based on corrections best practices and are tightly integrated with
the key features and functions inherent within the Elite JMS. As a result, the medical intake
process can be tightly integrated with an agency’s standard booking procedure through use of
customizable workflow features. This allows medical intake to occur at any point in the overall
booking process or it can be maintained as a totally independent business process.

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The efficiently designed integration between correctional and medical information eliminates
redundancy in data capture and provides instantaneous access to information subject to system
security user profiles. Furthermore, a complete history of key inmate health information is
available to medical personnel at all times.
Implementation of a series of pre-defined triggers makes the EHR system a proactive tool for
notifying staff when critical situations arise. This could include automatically sending messages
to medical personnel when an inmate being booked requires immediate attention.
In addition, the system can pop-up on-line messages related to medical/security issues (for
example, the inmate is diabetic and requires insulin 4 times per day) that all staff must be aware
of, including at time of booking.
Schedules and Movements
Syscon’s integrated JMS/EHR package eliminates the possibility of scheduling conflicts by
utilizing a unified scheduling module. All scheduled activities (courts dates, internal hearings,
program events, education classes, classification meetings, medical referrals and appointments,
etc.) are maintained in a single data table. As a result, when staff attempt to schedule an event
that is in conflict with an already scheduled activity the system will immediately notify the staff
member of the conflict and provide options for handling the situation. These options may
include modifying the newly introduced event, allowing the conflict to exist until some future
time, or notifying the original event author of the conflict and working toward a
schedule compromise.

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An additional feature resulting from integration with the JMS is the ability to view future
scheduled events and plan the distribution of medical services based on this information. This
eliminates the time-consuming effort required to find the location of an inmate for, say, required
medications, when an inmate is moved without the prior knowledge of medical staff.
Alerts and Restrictions
The TAG OMS includes a detailed Alerts sub-system that prominently displays important
information about an offender on every inmate specific screen. Standard corrections’ alerts –
(V)iolent offender, (S)uicidal, etc. – are as important to medical staff as they are to line officers. In
addition, through the EHR system, qualified medical personnel can add medical alerts that will
be of equal interest to security, classification and program personnel.
Alert Details LOV

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The OMS also handles offender restrictions for commissary purchases within the Commissary
module. An important inter-relationship exists between the Commissary module and the
EHR system; when dietary restrictions are entered into the EHR system these restrictions are
automatically carried over to the Commissary module. For example, an inmate that is identified
as a diabetic will be unable to purchase items containing sugar from the commissary.
Cost Recovery
The ability to recover some of the costs associated with the provision of medical services to
inmates is an important step toward maintaining fiscal viability within a corrections organization.
Recognizing this, we have specifically designed the EHR system to integrate fully with the Elite
Inmate Trust Accounting package of the JMS, thus ensuring that opportunities for billing
inmates for services are not lost. Pre-defined obligations can be identified against an inmate’s
trust account and funds withdrawn automatically based on applicable payment rules.
Housing and Internal Location Tracking
Accurate, real-time tracking of an inmate’s current internal location (for example, gym, law
library) and bed location is valuable when attempting to locate an inmate for the purpose of
administering medical treatment. Furthermore, the ability to readily obtain inmate ‘cluster’
views at the unit and facility levels allows medical personnel to disseminate services in a more
coordinated fashion. Only full integration with the JMS can make this available.
Compliance and Inmate Lawsuits
The ability to link data on medical treatment within the framework of a consolidated offender
record allows an agency to advance a stronger defense against inmate lawsuits claiming
negligence or failure to comply with legislative rules and regulations or court-mandated duties.

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Through-Care
If an offender is transferred from one facility in an agency to another, the entire offender record –
including all medical details and history – is transferred automatically. This minimizes the need
to move hard copy files (and the corresponding creation of duplicate file entries) and eliminates
the possibility that errors are made during the transfer of critical medical data.
Furthermore, integration of the OMS with EHR enables medical staff to receive automatic,
real-time messages related to the future transfer or release of an inmate. This allows staff to
efficiently remove an inmate from medication rounds, clinic appointments and other scheduled
events, thus saving time and expense.
Equally important, OMS/EHR integration ensures proper through-care of service via the
coordination of medical treatment with external service providers such as community care
facilities and other corrections’ medical providers.
Third Party Data
Finally, the issue of the control of inmate medical data is of the utmost importance. If a
corrections organization’s medical supplier maintains the inmates’ health records on a system
that they provide, there may well be difficulties – and certainly delays – in recovering offender
information should the medical contract expire or be terminated. Maintaining this inmate
medical data as an integral part of the agency’s own OMS guarantees the agency will always
have access to vital inmate medical data.
Conclusion
In summary, we believe a clear and strong argument has been made for integrating your
Electronic Health Records system within an overall Jail Management System.
In the corrections environment, health and security are inter-dependent. By implementing the
necessary security matrix – such as that offered with the Elite JMS solution – it is now possible
to give your organization the best of all worlds: a sophisticated inmate health records system
sharing information with a comprehensive JMS when it makes logical and legal sense while, at
the same time, ensuring that data privacy concerns are appropriately addressed.
Syscon Justice Systems Elite Electronic Health Records Systems is this solution.
is this solution.
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© 2009-2011 Syscon Justice Systems. All Rights Reserved.