OtisHealth

The Challenge:

EMR, or Electronic Medical Record, is a computerized system used by healthcare providers to store, manage, and access patient health information. It has replaced the traditional paper-based record-keeping system, offering numerous benefits to healthcare professionals and patients.

One of the major advantages of EMR is enhanced patient care. With EMR, healthcare providers can access a patient's complete medical history, including past diagnoses, medications, test results, and allergies, at the touch of a button. This comprehensive and up-to-date information allows doctors to make more informed medical decisions, improving the accuracy and quality of patient care. EMR facilitates better communication between healthcare providers, as they can easily share patient records and collaborate on treatment plans.

Although EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) have brought about significant advancements in the healthcare industry, they still encounter several key challenges. One such challenge which we are supporting our customer Otishealth to address is Interoperability.

This lack of compatibility and interoperability between electronic medical records (EMRs) is a significant challenge in the healthcare industry. When patient information cannot be easily shared and accessed by different healthcare providers, it hampers the continuity of care and coordination between healthcare facilities. This can lead to various issues, including:

1. Fragmented and incomplete patient information: If a patient seeks care from multiple healthcare providers, each with their own EMR system, obtaining a complete and comprehensive view of the patient's medical history becomes difficult. This can lead to important information being missed, redundant tests or procedures being performed, and potential medical errors.
2. Delayed access to critical information: When there is no interoperability between EMR systems, transferring patient information between different healthcare facilities becomes manual and time-consuming. This delay in accessing critical patient data can result in delayed diagnoses, treatment delays, and compromised patient safety.
3. Inefficient care coordination: Seamless coordination and communication among healthcare providers are crucial for effective care delivery. Lack of interoperability makes sharing real-time information, test results, and treatment plans challenging, leading to miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and suboptimal care coordination.

The OtisHealth Application:

The OtisHealth application is a comprehensive platform that enables patients to gather and manage their medical information from multiple Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems. With this application, patients can have a unified and real-time view of their complete medical history, ensuring better coordination of care.

OtisHealth integrates with multiple EMR systems, allowing for seamless data exchange. The application connects to these systems through secure APIs and interoperability standards and retrieves relevant patient data.

With internet connectivity, patients can access their medical records in real-time from any device. This ensures they have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips, regardless of the EMR system their healthcare providers use.

The application captures various aspects of a patient's medical history, including diagnoses, medications, allergies, lab test results, immunizations, procedures, and previous hospitalizations. By consolidating this information, patients can have a holistic view of their health status.

Technology behind the Solution:

The FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) system is a standard for electronically exchanging healthcare and clinical data. It is designed to facilitate interoperability between different healthcare systems and applications by providing a framework for exchanging, integrating, sharing, and retrieving healthcare information.

FHIR uses a modular approach and modern web-based technologies to enable seamless data exchange between healthcare systems. It uses resources as the basic building blocks that represent various healthcare data elements such as patients, medications, observations, encounters, etc. Standardized data elements define these resources and can be combined and exchanged to represent complex healthcare scenarios.

The connectors developed by Elevondata facilitate the extraction of relevant patient data, such as demographics, medical history, allergies, medications, lab results, and more, from different EMR systems using the standardized FHIR protocol.

By leveraging the FHIR protocol, the connectors ensure interoperability between the OtisHealth application and diverse EMR providers, eliminating the need for complex and time-consuming custom integrations. This standardization allows for smoother onboarding of new EMR systems, as the connectors can easily adapt to the specific implementation of each provider.

In conclusion, Elevondata's contribution to developing connectors using the FHIR protocol plays a crucial role in enabling OtisHealth to connect and onboard new EMR systems seamlessly. This generic and scalable solution aims to establish OtisHealth as a comprehensive and reliable source of healthcare information, ultimately enhancing the quality and efficiency of care delivery.