Your Guardian System may require updating in one of three ways:
Updates to your Hospital or Health Service's Clinical Model and (more rarely) the underlying database structure (through the addition of fields and/ or tables).
Updates to either Bedside; Central Surveillance; or Desktop (Athena) Applications and/ or underlying Services that share information between the different Guardian applications.
Updates to the K2MS Bedside Portal operating system, shell, or device drivers.
General Update Process
1. Clinical model/ software/ service/ portal update required
2. K2MS IT Service Delivery Manager and Customer's System Manager define update plan:
scope and urgency of change (eg. is Change Advisory Board approval required)
prerequisites (eg. are 3rd party system changes required prior to update)
resources (eg. are Customer IT support staff required)
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
communication plan (eg. are changes to user manuals/ training materials required)
backup and roll back process (if update fails)
date and time of update
3. Update performed
4. Implementation feedback form completed by customer and returned to K2MS IT Service Delivery Manager
1. Clinical Model Update Process
These are, by far, the most common form of Guardian update. Updates to the clinical model change the contents of data collection/ display/ reporting screens in either the bedside or desktop software. This may include the addition of new data collection fields; complete 'wizards'; or new reports. The update process follows the General Update Process with the following variations:
After customer signs off that the clinical model change is acceptable (usually after customer UAT) against the signed Scope of Work (SoW) , K2 validate the changes, issues a Clinical Model number and the update to the production environment is then scheduled:
Customer performs database back-up and advises K2MS (optional - only necessary if significant database table/ field changes are required).
K2MS support technician advises Customer System Manager of new Clinical Model number and uploads the new clinical model version to the database
Clinical model is automatically updated when either the bedside portal or desktop (athena) software is closed andrestarted
Customer confirms that production bedside and desktop software versions are reporting the updated clinical model number (via the bedside 'spanner' or desktop 'cog' screens)
Normally, clinical users can continue to use the bedside and desktop software during the update as the update is not applied until the software is closed and restarted.
Infrequently, when significant changes to the clinical model are made, structural changes to the database are required. If this is required, then use of the system must be discontinued until the update process has been completed. K2 will advise if this is the case and work with the customer to keep workflow disruption to a minimum.
2. Application and/ or Service Update Process
Updates to applications and/ or services are generally conducted when and if there are new features or functional improvements.
The Guardian software environment is comprised of four applications:
Bedside application (on the K2MS Portals)
Central Surveillance application (on a dedicated central station computer)
Administration Tool
Athena desktop application (deployed to various customer workstations)
and at least five (and sometimes more) services:
K2MS service (installed onto bedside portals and central station computers)
Clinical Web Portal real time streaming service (installed onto the web server)
Central Station broadcast relay service (installed onto the central station)
Central Station Print service (installed onto the central station)
PAS listener service (can sometimes be installed onto the webserver if the webserver is not in the DMZ)
Other HL7 interface services
Updates to applications and/ or services follow the General Update Process, with the following variations:
New application release notes shared with customer. K2 indicates if update is mandatory.
If the update is not mandatory, customer determines if new release features and/ or functions are preferred and requests an application update from K2
K2 schedules change with customer
If the update is to the Bedside Application or associated K2MS service, the new application version is uploaded to the Customer's production database. The application update on the bedside portal can then be manually initiated from the update button in the 'spanner' screen. Once downloaded to the portal, the portal will require a restart.
If the update is to either the Central Surveillance; Administration Tool or K2MS/ Print/ Broadcast Relay services installed onto the central station computer, a K2MS technician will remote onto the central station computer and manually install the new application version. This usually takes between 15 to 30 minutes and will disable the clinical web portal function during this time
If the update is to the Athena desktop application, the new application version is provided to the Customer's application packaging team for packaging and deployment to target workstations
Updates to the Clinical Web Portal application, real time streaming service, PAS listener service or similar will be manually installed by a K2MS technician
3. Bedside Portal Operating System and/ or Shell Update Process
These are extremely rare and are only ever required if there is a functional or operational issue with using the K2MS Bedside Portal.
Updates to the bedside portal operating system and/ or shell follow the General Update Process, with the following variations:
The bedside portal Operating System cannot be updated remotely and can only be updated by a K2MS Technician with physical access to the bedside portal
The bedside portal Shell is updated via an upload to the production database. The new Shell will be automatically downloaded to the Bedside Portal in the background after a few minutes and automatically installed the next time the Portal is restarted. The new version number will be displayed on the Shell background screen on the right hand side near the bottom of the screen.