The ICPA (Almada’s Institute of Preventive Cardiology) is a private social solidarity entity, established almost 30 years ago by a group of doctors from the cardiovascular area and non-medical people with reputation in the community. Its main business is in the prevention and early diagnosis of heart disease without neglecting other specialties.
EPM was chosen by ICPA for clinical and administrative management of its four health units located in Almada, Lisbon, Monte da Caparica and Beja.
The ICPA Management Team reports that changing to EPM contributes to ICPA’s growth and innovation strategy in the past 4 years. "It was becoming essential to replace an obsolete software with one that would meet our growth needs and facilitate the provision of the service."
With EPM was possible to have the main tools of clinical management as client record, medical records, electronic prescribing and schedule management in an integrated manner, which allows to get "more updated information and easily  available to all users", they refer.
Although available in cloud, in this particular case ePM was installed in a data center but is provided by web 4 clinical units, unifying databases and centralizing the whole process of management and production of indicators and statistics (financial, clinical, administrative, etc.).
Six months after entry into production, Rui Salgado, ePM Manager believes that "the system has produced gains," including the "automated management processes," creation of a clinical process and "on-time data for a better decision making."
Regarding acceptance by all users, the IPCA team is very clear, because despite some initial resistance, "the vast majority recognizes the advantages and benefits of EPM." Given the speed of implementation and migration from one system to another, "we believe that the action was successful!"