Bringing disparate systems together
While computers and the internet have provided us with new tools for exchanging data between healthcare professionals, timely access to all relevant information pertaining to a particular patient remains a challenge.
Patient history and treatment details tend to be scattered across several systems, and there is often no clear-cut path for obtaining access to the latest and most trustworthy information.
Data sharing must be seamless across organisation and system boundaries, and access privileges must be managed across multiple groups of stakeholders including patients, general practitioners, hospitals, and further organisations in the extended healthcare delivery ecosystem.
Your organisation is part of a logistical network
MODA + MODE (Model Oriented Domain Analysis and Engineering) provide advanced techniques for semantic system integration and modular solution design.
Model Oriented Domain Analysis and Engineering offers a systematic approach for:
- Translating the tacit knowledge, which often resides within the heads of domain experts, or which is sometimes buried in difficult-to-maintain software code, into explicit knowledge that does not decay over time.
- Integrating the knowledge of multiple domain experts in a cross-disciplinary context, and addressing the challenges of conflicting notations and terminologies.
- Streamlining the end-to-end new system integration process based on open standards.
- Creating advanced automation solutions that often lead to severalfold improvements in quality, reliability, and productivity.
Integration with electronic health record systems
We advise clients on best practices for integrating electronic health record systems via the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and IPS (International Patient Summary) standards.
The IPS standard covers relevant metadata (record author, attester, data custodian) as well as essential health data (medication summary, allergies and intolerances, problem list, immunisations, history of procedures, medical devices, diagnostic results) and further optional data sets.
Beyond domain expertise and technology research capabilities, we assist solution design initiatives with healthcare metadata management tools that are informed by the needs of local communities, clinicians, nurses, and allied health professionals who work on the front lines of healthcare delivery. This facilitates seamless information exchange between healthcare service providers, whilst respecting the limits imposed by patient controlled health data access privileges and regionally applicable data governance policies.
Our metadata management tools in combination with the Smart on FHIR standard can assist streamline the integration between electronic health record systems such as OpenMRS, a best-of-breed Open Source system that is used by more than 5,500 healthcare facilities in over 40 countries to provide improved healthcare to 12.6 million patients.
The standards based approach allows the same integration code to interface with any other health IT systems, including Cerner, Epic and other proprietary EMR systems, practice management software, laboratory systems, financial, and billing systems, among others, which also support the same FHIR resource types and APIs.
Our track record
Our team has worked with federal and state government health departments in Australia to improve the speed and accuracy of the health informatics standard specification and reference software implementation publication process.
- Our model-based tooling revealed possible gaps between requirements, specifications and software which previously needed days or weeks of expert testing and clinical safety analysis using text-only artefacts.
- Critical flaws in open source tooling were corrected and contributed back to the international health informatics standards community.
- S23M was able to reveal the power of automatically generated traces between models using formal model transformations, merged with human-documented correspondences. A demonstration SaaS tool showed appropriate role-based views of the end-to-end process to management, business analysts, clinical safety experts, information modellers and specifiers, and software developers.
S23M’s model oriented methodology integrates distributed systems via the SNOMED-CT compliant interoperability standards stipulated by national and regional health authorities. This means data quality challenges can be reduced significantly, and as a result, the number of mistakes in diagnostics and patient care can be reduced correspondingly.
