March 31, 2005

Healthcare Integration as a Group

Healthcare is a funny beast to tackle. Best of Breed Solutions from the 90?s and best of group solutions from the turn of the century till now. Data transmitted everywhere in all types of formats. The concept of Data Warehousing is there just in the back of everyone?s mind. It would be a nice to have, but with a falling net revenue, and view of IT as an operational tool. We just aren?t there yet.

Healthcare IT organizations team structure seems to be around either line-of-business functions, (clinical, revenue cycle, finance) or supported applications(hospital registration, hospital billing, labs) So the data gets passed every which way up down right left and side ways. We have point to point interfaces, realtime interfaces through and interface engine, realtime interfaces CICS to CICS, and the really special ones where we pass through one system just to hit another and finally the last one (the place we really wanted to go to)

I think in order to advance the quality of healthcare it we need to add a new group into the mix, the enterprise applications group. This group would have a team just dedicated to interfacing, enterprise reporting, and other enterprise level it work. This would help to standardized the transport mechanisms and format of some of the data, and provide guidelines for best practices. Also since a true understanding of the data would be occurring, this is probably the best group to maintain the enterprise reporting application, with several end users from the business side converting to IT.

Posted by Elyse at March 31, 2005 8:23 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I agree. Dealing with multiple systems who all have different data types can be a real headache.

Whether you're using HIS, Cerner, or some other nightmare there is no agreed upon form of data format. Granted, there is at least HL7, but it doesn't cover all aspects and not everyone follows the format closely (let alone it still needs a lot of work).

I say we put our foot down now and start our own format. We'll call it "Medical Formats R Us" or something witty and charge lots of money to assist companies in their transition to it. :)

Okay, that'll never happen, but it would be nice if it was less frustrating and difficult.

Posted by: Jeff Coughlin at March 31, 2005 2:13 PM