As I look across the healthcare IT landscape, I believe we’re just at the beginning of a real integrated solutions that leverage everything that technology can offer. However, I see it starting to happen. A good example of this was this case study I found on “Automated Workflow for Pain Management.”
The case study goes into the details of the time savings and other benefits of proper pain management in the hospital. However, I was really intrigued by their integration of bedside TVs together with barcodes, EHR software, and nurse messaging (sadly they used a pager, but that could have easily been replaced with secure messaging). What a beautiful integration and workflow across so many different technologies from different companies and this is just the start.
One major challenge to these workflows is making these external applications work with the EHR software. Hopefully things like the blog post I wrote yesterday will help solve that problem. Case studies like the one above illustrate really well the value of outside software applications being able to integrate with EHR software.
What I also loved about the above solution is that it doesn’t cause any more work for the hospital staff. In fact, in many ways it can save them time. The nurse can have much higher quality data about who needs them and when.
This implementation is also a preview of what Kyle Samani talked about in his post “Unlocking the Power of Data Science in Healthcare.” While Kyle wrote about it from the perspective of patients and getting them the right information in the right context, the same applies to healthcare providers. The case study above is an example of this shift. No doubt there will be some resistance to these technologies in healthcare, but once they get refined we’ll wonder how we lived without them.
The smartest thing the top EHR vendors can do do today is create an API to their system.
Sure, scary, but done right, especially for the EHRs aimed at hospitals, it would truly open up pure (native) integration.
With a well done API, and lots of “apps” written for your EHR, suddenly you become unbelievably popular.