Integration across the spectrum
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| Mary Stevens, Editor |
Necessity was the driver for CareGroup to replace its application integration platform, and our Q&A Exclusive touches on an integration obstacle, change management, that will likely be familiar to many readers.
A different sort of application integration is simplifying duties for nurses at Huntington Hospital, as CMIO's Jeff Byers reports in our second exclusive. When there is an app for almost everything, sooner or later, many of these will be finding their way to your clinicians’ devices, and no one wants to carry around three or four pagers if they can avoid doing so.
On the interoperability front, as health systems seek common terms to enable clinical systems to communicate and share data with other departments, medical terminology management company Health Language has added a procedure category to its provider-friendly terminology (PFT) code set that includes 40,000 synonyms, abbreviations and colloquial expressions commonly used by healthcare professionals when documenting or searching for patient data. The expanded PFT enables searching of procedures such as surgeries and includes maps to terminologies such as SNOMED CT and ICD-10-PCS.
Along the same lines, HL7 integration company Caristix has released software designed for interface analysts and engineers to help bridge their healthcare data gaps. Caristix Conformance is a conformance profile management application that automates profile creation, gap analysis and documentation, while Caristix Test software is a test automation application designed for HL7 integration.
Images and integration, a topic that’s generating interest from providers and agencies alike, will be in the spotlight at RSNA Nov. 28 to Dec. 3. Merge recently announced it will show new and updated technologies that encourage interoperability, as well as imaging sharing and mobile healthcare applications. Merge iConnect, a new platform for sharing of images between providers and integration of imaging into health IT applications.
It’s certainly not the only vendor that will be in Chicago showcasing image-exchange prowess. This is good news because, as KLAS reports, integration is not a strong suit for radiation delivery systems. Healthcare providers noted that oncology technologies perform well overall, but some with exceptions, such as limitations in integration.
These integration issues make the selection process difficult. In the KLAS report, providers also said that working with the same vendor for different systems does not necessarily take away integration headaches, according to the report.
What is your biggest integration or interoperability headache? Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.
Mary Stevens
Editor of CMIO