Heightened monitoring of public health: a new system for Institutes of Public Health

The Institute of Public Health in Ostrava has adopted a fundamental innovation with the introduction of a new economic and administrative system in the last few days. Key systems have been integrated into a single unit. In addition to its primary aim (the resolution of economic and administrative processes), this new innovation is also to contribute to heightened monitoring of the protection of public health and reducing health risks to the population.

The Institute of Public Health in Ostrava is an organisation that provides medical and laboratory services and evaluates information relating to public health. It conducts investigations and evaluations in the areas of microbiology, parasitology, allergology and immunology, and analyses of water, soils and the atmosphere. The Institute of Public Health has another 14 units (in addition to the one in Ostrava), which to date have generally worked with independent information systems.

The criteria for the new economic and administrative system were as follows:
• The system must provide the appropriate support for all the office work of this state-funded organisation.
• The system must be robust and capable of handling a large volume of data and a large number of users working at the same time.
• The system must have the necessary technological means for integration with laboratory information systems.

The Institute of Public Health in Ostrava chose the company Aquasoft, which specialises in the development of large information systems (particularly for the state administration), as supplier of the system. Petr Franc, Managing Director of Aquasoft, has the following to say about the order: “The introduction of a centralised economic and administrative system was crucial to making the activity of the institute as a whole more effective.” The system MS Dynamics AX was chosen for the implementation of the economic and administrative system. “This covers all the subsystems and areas that the institute requires for its economic and administrative system, i.e. Finance and Accounts, Assets, Purchases, Sales, Inventory Management, CRM, Supplier Relations Management, and the additional modules Bank and Cash Desk,” says Franc.

In his words, MS Dynamics AX is a system that provides a good foundation for the creation of a solution that is highly adapted to the customer’s needs. In addition to standard economic and administrative functions, the economics and administrative system can be supplemented with modules and functions that are specific to the given customer. In the case of the Institute of Public Health a great many demanding requirements had to be satisfied, including integration with laboratory systems. “The result of the work performed by the Aquasoft team was the creation of a solution tailor-made to suit the customer,” adds Petr Franc.

The entire project was a great challenge for Aquasoft. “There were two critical factors to its success in particular: meeting the needs of the organisation and managing the integration of MS Dynamics AX with LabSys systems with Microsoft BizTalk Server technology,” says Petr Franc in closing.