Stelios Halkiotis 19/04/2010

Hospital Information Systems and diversity

The structure of Healthcare provider organizations

and the way they are financed have led to a high degree of autonomy of departments with respect to their choice of IT applications. Departments tend to choose the application that suits their particular requirements. While these applications in their standalone capacity support the activities of the departmental processes, the integration of these applications has a clear added value for the organization as a whole.

Systems and Components

Pharmacy Inpatient Administrati0n Systems Outpatient Administration System Emergency Department Information System Patient Tracking and Identification Systems

Supplies

Nursing Information systems

Laboratory Information System

HR System

Medical Records /Clinical Information systems

Radiology Information System

Intensive care information system

Inventories

Patient Billing

P.A.C.S.

Surgical Information System

Payroll System

Claims management

Accounting systems

Reporting and B.I. Systems

Interoperability..
The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged or a property referring to the ability of diverse systems or organizations to work together

Interoperability..
A message is a collection of data that encapsulates

information about an event in the healthcare enterprise. (HL7 messages, xml, flat files, etc) The data connection between two computer systems is called an interface. (Tcp/ip clients and servers, http clients and servers, database tables, ftp clients, file folders etc.)

Interoperability..
The traditional way of integration is based on point-to-

point connections. The healthcare provider has very little control over the creation, maintenance and upgrading of this type of proprietary solution, and the dependency on the vendors involved, is relatively high. A change of one of the systems involved causes the whole point-to-point connection development cycle to start all over again. Each, connection potentially has its own transport mechanism and message format, and in many cases is poorly documented, hard to integrate and hard to maintain. Some systems may be new, some may be legacy, some speak XML, some fixed-position text and some of them may not support messaging functionalities.

Systems and Components

If there are N applications, and every application links to every other application, the total number of point-to-point connections required is N * (N - 1)/2.
Pharmacy Inpatient Administrati0n Systems Outpatient Administration System Emergency Department Information System Patient Tracking and Identification Systems

Supplies

Nursing Information systems

Laboratory Information System

HR System

Medical Records /Clinical Information systems

Radiology Information System

Intensive care information system

Inventories

Patient Billing

P.A.C.S.

Surgical Information System

Payroll System

Claims management

Accounting systems

Reporting and B.I. Systems

The Message Broker Concept

A Message Broker is a centralized hub that simplifies

communication among heterogeneous systems. Takes care of all connections between the applications in an organization. One connection is created between each system and the Message Broker and messages are transported via this bi-directional connection.

The Message Broker Concept

Emergency Department Information System Outpatient Administration System Laboratory Information System Payroll System Inpatient Administrati0n Systems Supplies

Pharmacy

Medical Records /Clinical Information systems

P.A.C.S.

Message Broker
Reporting and B.I. Systems

HR System

Claims management Nursing Information systems Patient Billing Radiology Information System Accounting systems Intensive care information system

Surgical Information System

Payroll System

Inventories

The Message Broker Concept

Main functionalities: Message translation(message mapping ) Message routing Message transformation Message archiving Advantages : better cost/benefit ratio than point-to-point connections the cost of creating new connections is significantly lower

Benefits
Interoperability helps patients get the most out of

technology When different products can be combined without complicated and expensive interfaces, small companies can enter a field and make specialized products. Without interoperability, hospitals are forced to turn to large vendors that provide suites of compatible applications. As a result, Interoperability promotes competition, and competition encourages innovation and quality.

Thank you.