June 10th, 2005 andrew
At the upcoming HIC 2005 meeting there will be an IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) demo. This will demonstrate the power of standards to link applications from different vendors, running on different platforms.
Medical-Objects is participating in this demo. Knowing our HL7 complies with current Australian Standards and regular testing for AHML compliance makes this less daunting. We are currently working with other vendors to make this demonstation happen.
Posted in HL7, IHE | No Comments »
June 9th, 2005 andrew
Medical-Objects will be deploying its messaging system in the Eastern Goldfields Regional Reference SiteProject Summary
While the number of physical users is not huge the geographic area covered by this project is enormous. (1/3 of Western Australia) Realtime messaging in this environment will bridge the gap between remote providers, allowing transparent, secure transfer of medical data at internet speeds. We are currently in the planning stages but expect to start installing next month when the broadband rollout is complete.
Posted in HL7, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 1st, 2005 andrew
The real jewel in the e-Health crown is computers that meticulously check everything in a way that no human can hope to match.
Using a modern PC to produce a text based letter is like calling in NASA for the launch of a paper plane. Our computers should be checking everything based on a set of rules we give them, not simple rules but easily customised rules that clinicians can enter and then ask our PCs to execute.
And, your PC could triage your in-tray
The medical day includes a lot of juggling of priorities, and ideally we want to be able to triage the in tray.
I want the abnormal result that is a surprise, to jump out at me, the referral for the deeply jaundiced patient to float to the top of the pile of requests. The patient who is on Warfarin that is booked for a procedure should generate an alert about the Warfarin. The follow up system should know that the patient actually has been followed up.
Medical-Objects has been delving into Snomed-CT for 12 months, and we are hooked.
It’s so beautifully simple and yet so powerful. Snomed-CT is very user friendly, to a clinician it has the richness to actually find most things you normally say, and if it doesn’t you can combine concepts to say it.
From a computer science point of view it has intelligence about medical concepts that take years for clinicians to acquire, and its all there for the taking.
Questions like “Was the procedure done laparoscopically” can be answered in a flash. You can compare different ways of saying the same thing for equivalence and it works, or at least for now it works pretty well.
The beauty of its structure is that it can get better at this and drag all the existing data up to new higher level.
Australia has been evaluating its options, but there is a cost in the delay.
The US and UK have made Snomed the national terminology, freely available for any clinician to use.
Even if we do not use the full power of something like snomed-CT we need to make a start, try and allow patient health records to be coded into some way, even at a basic level, as this can be leveraged in the future.
A simple system might look attractive, both financially and technically to “get things going”, but it won’t cut it in the long run, we sacrifice the future to make the balance sheet look good now.
The lack of a national terminology is a huge roadblock.
The ability to communicate medical data electronically is highly dependant on a good terminology.
Most packages have the ability to import HL7 automatically, which is a very big advantage over manually pasting text into the practice software, and places it well ahead of unstructured messages, but it’s the potential to really understand what is in the content that’s the real prize.
There have been many calls for simple transfer formats, to get “things happening”, but in reality its the communications and PKI infrastructure that is holding this up rather than the structure of messages.
Once the ability to cope with the communications and security issues becomes widespread, which it will, the focus will turn to content.
Transport of unstructured content will increase the speed of delivery and availability of patient notes when they are needed, but that’s just replacing paper.
While that is a worthwhile outcome and a very solid first step, it fails to capitalise on the advantages of atomic health data in a standard format.
Posted in DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, GELLO, GLIF, HL7, SNOMED | No Comments »