Integration from the bottom up

I have written several articles in Healthcare Information Management & Communications Canada (on my own and co-authored with Bill Pascal, CTO for the Canadian Medical Association) regarding the need for a more “bottom approach” to integrating health IT systems across the continuum of care.  The crux of my argument is that the health sector is more an “ecosystem” and less an “enterprise”.  Hence, top down approaches are less likely to deliver tangible results in reasonable periods of time and are have a higher probability of failure.

Given my perspective on the need for more bottom initiatives, I was very interested to hear about a local integration project led by OntarioMD with funding from eHealth Ontario.    Physicians at the Barrie and Community Family Health Team are now electronically receiving patient reports from the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie.  These reports are transferred directly into the family health team’s EMR and include:

• Medical reports including discharge, consult, oncology, and surgery
• Diagnostic imaging reports (text only)

A key feature of the newly developed electronic Hospital Report Manager is that works with any EMR subsidized by Ontario’s EMR Adoption Program and can be used by any Ontario hospital.   EMR vendors need only develop a single interface to the Hospital Report Manager while each Hospital need only develop a single interface to the Hospital Report Manager.

Vendors involved in developing the Hospital Report Manager include:

• Orion Health whose Rhapsody integration engine is at the heart of the Hospital Report Manager
• Clinicare whose EMR product is used by the Barrie and Community Family Health Team.
• MyDDS and Graphically Speaking who developed the underlying database for routing reports
• Praxia which is conducting project evaluations
• Trusted by Design which performed the Privacy Impact Assessment
• Healthvision who developed the interface to the hospital’s Meditech hospital information system

Phase 2 is currently underway which will extend the scope of the project to additional participants including four new family health teams and three new hospitals.  Phase 3 and beyond depends upon availability of additional funding from eHealth Ontario.

Mike

eHealth – Canadian economic driver?

I have posted on several occasions about the seeming lack of national  industrial development strategy for the Canadian eHealth industry.   Hence,  I was pleased to read about a healthcare vendor taking on this cause, a vendor that has been very successful in the Canadian market.  Where is this vendor based?  Toronto?  Ottawa?  Vancouver?  Nope, Auckland, New Zealand!

Ian McCrae, CEO of New Zealand-based Orion Health, is quoted in a New Zealand Herald article

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/compute/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501832&objectid=10634956&pnum=0

as saying “We have a chance of being a hotbed of health innovation.  It’s something we should actually take advantage of because there some things we can’t do.  We can’t build cars, we can’t build spaceships, there’s lots we can’t do.  But this is one thing we can absolutely world class at.”  Hmmm … seems that we could say the same thing about Canada.  Canadian healthcare IT vendors, what do you think?  What is ITAC Health’s position on this matter? Orion has clearly demonstrated how success in the “home” market can be leverage for success in global markets.

Mike