Digital voices, clinical choices

In considering the transition from paper to digital information in healthcare, I am reminded of an IDC report on the ever-expanding digital universe, which asserted that between 2010 and 2020, the amount of digital data created and replicated globally would grow to 35 trillion gigabytes as all major forms of media complete the journey from analog to digital.

The reality of this influx of digital information in the healthcare is that providers will be forced to store, code and manage significant amounts of digital data. Presently, many healthcare organizations are seeking to prepare for the transition to digital information, by hook or crook, to be eligible for meaningful use.

Just this week, the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) released an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that converts the 200-page National Cancer Institute's Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events into a mobile app to assist clinical users to record, grade adverse events in clinical trials.

CHOP's mobile app is just one of many examples how organizations are using innovative tools for enhanced information dissemination in the wake of an urgent need to organize a growing mountain of digital data.

Similarly, researchers from the department of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston have recognized the need to integrate patient's clinical information into EMR system in order to improve the efficiency, safety and quality of services in radiology. A study, authored by Michael Zalis, MD, and Mitchell Harris, PhD, was released this month in the Journal of the American College of Radiology detailing the implementation of a homegrown system called QPID (Queriable Patient Inference Dossier) that serves as a search engine for MGH's EMR system to aggregate its data across the multi-institution enterprise.

In April, Zalis told CMIO that QPID's future place in health IT provided an ability to reflect providers' clinical insights into their search experience by employing, among other tools, search logic based on the proximity and association of complex saved word combinations. The system currently serves 500 registers users at MGH and posts 7,000 to 10,000 pages of medical record data daily.

So, as the digital universe grows, so too will the number of innovators and devices to assist healthcare to move forward to manage these data and provide better patient care.

To discuss this topic further, please send emails to jbyers@trimedmedia.com.

Jeff Byers
Staff Writer