Game-changing interoperability for healthcare: Bringing semantically harmonized clinical information into provider workflows from disparate health information technologies

Healthcare suffers from no shortage of data - laboratory results, imaging studies, clinical history, procedures, treatment summaries, etc. But while volume is not an issue, value is. Clinicians face significant obstacles in identifying what information is valuable, what part of it is available, how to access it and how to make it useful rather than simply viewable. In the midst of today's debate of about the future of healthcare, one certainty emerges: The industry must ensure comprehensive, up-to-date patient information is available to the current provider at the immediate point of care. Physicians in the ED or inpatient setting need access to medical information generated in outpatient and primary care facilities. Community providers must be able to view and use relevant information from a patient's hospital stay. Unfortunately, data sets are locked into health information technology (HIT) silos - generated and stored in disparate systems that don't communicate, or are incapable of synthesizing data to make it meaningful and usable. Assaf Halevy will discuss innovative Health Information Exchange (HIE) approaches and tools that deliver valuable information from virtually any HIT system directly into a treating provider's workflow, while semantically harmonizing the data, its structure, content and nomenclature, making it actionable, simple and clear: · The application operates in the background, constantly indentifying the user, the application s/he is running and the patient. On the caregiver's behalf, the application automatically queries the solution's inherent HIE workspace for data the clinician lacks. If relevant information is found, a visual indication appears and the clinician can, in one click from within the current workflow, see an “exception view.” If valuable and required, the clinician can import data into the EHR and incorporate it into clinical decision making. · Significantly, the information is semantically harmonized. The solution collects the patient's current clinical picture, and packages it in the preferred nomenclature and structure of the consumer - regardless of originating system, vocabulary or format. Developers and beta users have identified a variety of benefits including: ·Physicians and nurses need not leave the clinical system and workflow they are in to view and use important patient information. The convenient, nonintrusive nature of the functionality saves time, and ensures a complete picture of the patient is considered during diagnosis, care planning and treatment. · Providers are not overwhelmed with data that may or may not be relevant to the current clinical episode because the application focuses on “delta data,” and enables users to access a high-level view from their workflow to determine what is important. · Unobtrusive, embedded GUI enables to clinicians to drill down for detailed, full-screen information as desired. ·Selective, semantic export functionality allows providers to import meaningful, actionable information to their EHR system or other vehicles including wireless devices. ·The solution can offer access to the full clinical picture throughout the continuum of care, over wireless network or internet, and across the boundaries of an organization.