You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Interoperability’ tag.
I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear about today’s launch of MEDS-ED Link, a project of the Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization (NoVaRHIO) in conjunction with Inova Health System and GE Healthcare.
As an insider in healthcare for more than 20 years, today is an exciting day for me. Picis, the company I co-founded with Liz Popovich and helped grow into an international software company with 700 employees, is being acquired by Ingenix, a leading HIT, consulting and services company with nearly 6,000 hospital clients around the world.
This is a classic “win-win-win” situation that will benefit us, Ingenix, and all our customers and prospects. With all that is going on in healthcare industry today, I can tell you from the heart that the timing was perfect for this transaction, and this is truly the best possible home for Picis in which to grow and prosper.
Although still far from achieving mainstream adoption, anesthesia information management systems (AIMS) have made significant strides since the early part of this decade. My research has found adoption of AIMS in the US at about 8-10% and rising, with 15-25% growth expected over the next few years. These systems have been available for more than two decades, but only recently has the notion of implementing an automated anesthesia record become widespread within the practice of anesthesiology.
It’s no surprise that the most successful AIMS solutions are those that allow the electronic anesthesia record to operate seamlessly with the other information systems installed in the hospital – where the interoperability begins in the operating room and extends as far as the outpatient areas. However, the latest anesthesia report issued by KLAS , entitled The Growing Market for Anesthesia Software: Liability, Integration and the Benefits of Adoption, has caused a wave of confusion for hospitals and health networks by using the terms “interfacing” and “integration” inaccurately.
Standing in the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS10 is frankly amazing. We are participating in the Emergency Department interoperability scenarios, passing clinical documentation to and from other systems, using IHE standards for information exchange. I was standing with a friend and CMIO who is a practicing physician, and when he saw how easy it was to get information regardless of source, his comment was, ”This is how it is supposed to work, how it was always supposed to work.” I agree. And more vendors than ever are participating.
Talking with the HIMSS folks that orchestrated the impressive setup, I come to find that the numbers of folks “interoperating” in this display have more than doubled in the past two years, now demoing nearly 60 use cases and 28 clinical scenarios. Similar to the IHE show in January, the interest in interoperability and move to embrace standards at HIMSS is palpable. And it’s not just on the show floor – I have been talking to vendors all over that are now delivering or planning to deliver shortly to their customers this type of technology.
The transition of patient care and documentation from one provider to another has always been a challenge for the healthcare industry — disconnected hospital systems can lead to a game of “telephone” with important patient data (on paper or verbally,) which is both inefficient and risky. I have been involved for years in connecting systems together, and the complex interfaces that have been used to do this in the past have been a headache — plus, they have not achieved the seamless “plug and play” that we have seen from other industries. Nobody worries about what brand of mouse or keyboard they purchase anymore, they plug it in and it works. When will we see this kind of Valhalla for medical systems?
Soon, hopefully. Government organizations are now getting involved in setting standards for healthcare systems to work together. I have never seen so much progress and I couldn’t be more excited about it. A lot of this effort is around something called a CCD, or continuity of care document. There are different forms and different names, but they all boil down to a document that summarizes an episode of care, with structured data around things like medications, allergies and a problems list, which can be consumed and used in any system that touches the patient. There is a central “library” that these documents are submitted to, and then can be “checked out” at any time so that the most accurate information is always available to the physician.
