A Cure for the Interoperability Blues?

Let’s imagine that you like the features of your transplant database and your hospital is transitioning your department away from your comfortable and dependable software, into an enterprise application. You’ve likely heard this transition makes sense and will provide costs savings for the entire organization, but you might be wondering if the cost savings will benefit your department. There are obvious economies of scale with an enterprise solution, but you can’t help but wonder if this will create new problems for you. Having access to clinical data within the continuum of care is wonderful, but it hasn’t eliminated the need for a fax machine.

Even as the largest healthcare systems implement enterprise electronic health records, interfaces and interoperability are still issues that must routinely be pondered. For example, the third largest public healthcare system in the nation is still using fax machines to share clinical results with their 1,600 physicians. (The Interoperability Blues Feb 17, 2015

As transplant administrators face increased demands transitioning from a database silo into the enterprise application, Advanced Data Capture is a great way to alleviate, if not cure, the interoperability blues.

These solutions include tools to monitor and distribute the workload among your team to help contend with fluctuating volumes of inbound results from non-interfaced labs.

Dealing with order duplication frequently creates unnecessary labor, wasted effort and potential for errors. This problem impacts your measurable quality and patient safety, and even more troubling is the potential for placing the organ at risk. Advanced Data Capture solutions include duplicate functionality where software operators are automatically informed and given processing options when duplicates exist in the system for results-in-progress.

Imagine if your team could quickly identify and locate results that are critical to quality patient care and treatment decisions. Search features help you find and prioritize processing of patient labs without shuffling through paper.

These types of tools boost productivity and information sharing, as well as shorten the amount of time it takes to get information into flow sheets and trending analysis. Advanced Data Capture can't save you from the flood of changes headed your way due to enterprise software decisions, but it will provide tools to keep your non-interfaced patient information flowing smoothly.


About the Author: Greg Gies

For 20 years in the software industry, Greg Gies has been helping businesses, government agencies and healthcare organizations achieve their goals and carry out their missions by making better use of information and automating business processes. Greg has held positions in sales, product management and marketing and holds an MBA from Babson College. He works and lives with his wife and three boys in the Boston area.