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A Medical Information Integration Solution
The amount of client data accumulated, especially in the medical field,
is increasing rapidly every year. Data is stored in a variety of different
applications or systems within departments or organizations that are
physically dispersed and remote. Large organizations need to provide
their clients with the best medical care and service while avoiding
clinical mistakes and unnecessary duplicate testing. These errors
can result in the spending of millions of dollars and are caused mainly
due to the lack of available, real-time clinical information. To illustrate
this point, in the USA alone it is estimated that more than 75,000
patients die each year and about $17B are wasted as a result of errors
in medical treatment. In many cases this is due to the lack of complete,
available and reliable information, the absence of medical tracking
and poor communication between clinicians.
The Healthcare IT (HCIT) industry has its roots in “product-centric”
vertical software development - as administrative, financial or basic
clinical needs were identified, stand-alone applications were developed
to address them individually. This best-of-breed approach has been
implemented to such an extent that today, on average; US hospitals
have more than thirty distinct information systems handling information
for disparate departments and divisions. Since each application is
designed with different structures, codes and protocols, fewer than
25 percent of these systems are able to share medical information
with each other. Care providers continue to struggle with inefficiencies
stemming from the silos of irretrievable information caused by disparate
legacy systems. Despite its different healthcare approach, Europe
is also facing exactly the same, severe problems.
The worldwide result of this situation is:
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Wasted Time.
Large amounts of time is consumed by physicians and
their assistants on tasks such as locating charts, searching
for specific medical information, following-up on consultations,
making phone calls to get results and/or tracking down a nurse
to get information - either inside or outside the hospital. |
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Wasted Money.
Unnecessary or duplicated testing contributes to
billions of wasted healthcare dollars every year. |
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Reduced Quality of Care.
Physicians may prescribe a drug that is not appropriate
for a particular patient without realizing that the patient
is allergic to the drug, or prescribe a therapy that is less
effective than another option. In addition, treatment of emergency
cases in the ER may be delayed due to inaccessible lab results
that are stored in a hospital's legacy systems. Market forces
such as mergers and acquisitions, government regulation (HIPAA
in the US, and European Privacy Standards), decentralization
and globalization are forcing the HCIT landscape to change
and to create a patient-centric environment that emphasizes,
more than ever, the need for information sharing. |
The healthcare industry worldwide strives for advanced
information technologies that will restructure inefficient data collection.
On the other hand, it is difficult to circulate information within
a large and decentralized organization. Even within one hospital each
department may work independently and produce its own data on the
same subject. Moreover, many enterprises consist of several geographically
remote units or branches with little exchange of critical information
between them. For example, a local hospital may generate over time
a file that contains critical medical information on a patient. When
that patient has to be treated at a different hospital, all the information
has to be generated again. In this case, although the two hospitals
may not belong to the same health fund or area, they do belong to
the same enterprise - national healthcare. This situation underlines
the need for a comprehensive computerized architecture capable of
interconnecting heterogeneous medical information systems and creating
a virtual homogenous environment in which complete, reliable and qualitative
information is available to the service provider at the point of care,
when it is needed. This is precisely the goal that the Nextel Engineering.
The Solution - Creating
Integrated Virtual Patient Records.
Nextel Engineering offers innovative and advanced technology that
enables the design, implementation, operation and management of web-based
medical information exchange. This solution enables online information
integration from different, distributed sources and their transfer
within seconds to authorized users according to different usage profiles
and security policies.
The medical information is integrated from a collection of participating
organizations (hospitals, districts, institutes, labs, etc.) in which
all of the information remains in its original location and format.
The uniqueness of the system is in its capacity to gather information
on demand from all of the information systems dispersed in the organizations,
to integrate the information into a single Virtual Patient Object
(VPO), and to transfer it within seconds to the clinical service provider
at the point of care thus delivering an integrated Virtual Patient
Record. This offers the caregiver a real-time, reliable and complete
picture of the relevant information needed for decision making and
enables the provision of effective medical care that meets the highest
standards.
Clinical
Views
The interface gives the care provider the option to view in real-time,
via a web browser, all (or part) of the patient’s up-to-date
medical history in a viewing pattern that matches the care provider's
profile and role. For this purpose, Nextel Engineering knows how to
locate all the databases that store medical information relevant to
a specific patient, to launch queries for information retrieval and
to perform all of the data processing required for the display of
the Virtual Patient Record. The Clinical Views runs as a thin client
on the end user’s workstation, hence only a web browser and
appropriate security clearance are required to gain access to the
data. It does not matter where the patient receives medical treatment
because at any time and anywhere the clinical professional can view
all of the patient’s relevant medical history. Using Clinical
Views, the solution supports the flexible building of user profiles
that can be managed by the authorized personnel in the organization.
This flexibility ensures the simple and powerful adjustment of the
contents to different users so that each care provider may view only
information that is relevant to the patient while determining the
historical depth, the content and the methods of display.
SmartWatch
Nextel Engineering SmartWatch enables sophisticated monitoring and
alerting rules to identify events that can only be detected by creating
an integrated Virtual Patient Record. Monitoring and alerting of SARS,
abnormal test results of diabetic patients and tracking different
populations of patients are only a few examples of information that
cannot be found unless one integrates the data. SmartWatch provides
alerts and notifications in a push manner to the end user - on screen,
by text-messaging (SMS) or E-mail, etc. – both for the patient
at the point of care and as an ongoing background process for entire
predefined populations. This is a powerful, proactive tool at the
point of care that brings critical issues to the care provider's attention
and can prove invaluable in making the right decisions.
For further details: sanidad@nexteleng.es |
