Most Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) were not designed to support nursing clinical workflow. They were designed to capture discrete data in fields that are set up in a linear fashion, mainly to support billing and charge capture. Clinical workflow comes in many varieties, but it is rarely linear. Nurses are daunted by the often laborious process of using the EMR, even those that happen to be strong typists struggle with the poorly designed user interfaces that require completion of multiple required fields. The valuable time of the nurse is being eaten away in front of a computer. The need to capture data, in order to justify the out of control rise in healthcare costs, as well as patient safety concerns, has led us to adopting a form of …

In August of 2006 the US Government passed an executive order to implement electronic health records by 2014. Recent moves in global healthcare IT standards address many medical domains; however, there has been little attempt to provide interoperability in transport medicine. We present an Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile for Transport Medicine, to facilitate interoperability between various healthcare facilities and the transport environment utilizing distributed computing technologies such as SOAP envelopes for ebXML over mobile networks. Ful Text: Implementing Interoperability using an IHE Profile for Interfacility Patient Transport

Electronic Health Records enhance patient care across medicine enabling providers to view historical information from the patients chart, viewing results from participating agencies, sharing notes with providers outside their institution and utilizing integrated support systems which protect against medication errors and redundancies. The field of transport medicine revolves around emergent patient transports by ambulance, helicopter and plane. These are resource poor environments and, coincidentally, occur during the most critical times of the patient’s condition. The need to support transport clinicians with the most valid pertinent information about each patient is the main focus to our research. We proposed an ontological approach around transport medicine protocols which associated multiple diseases and their associated symptoms. We have developed semantic queries using the patient’s current symptoms as input and the query …

Current Enterprise Architecture (EA) models provide little guidance, if any, for implementing interoperability in healthcare organizations. We propose an EA interoperability method that leverages current EA models and business IT. This phased approach was followed during the implementation of an Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile. IHE Profiles provide a common language for purchasers and vendors to discuss the integration needs of healthcare sites and the integration capabilities of healthcare IT products. This profile was reviewed and approved by member organizations of the IHE and is currently being used in trial implementation. Our EA interoperability method refocuses a healthcare organization’s principles and IT to include external entities that current EA models ignore for competitive reasons. Our approach shows the advantage of considering these external relationships between competitors and synergistic …

Abstract.Thanks to recent medical record standards and distributed technology, the exchange of medical documents has become readily available.Healthcare institutions are able to share documents with other providers and specialty care facilities as well as third party billing vendors and pharmacies; however, patients who require medical transport are still subject to rudimentary exchange of information through verbal reports and outdated hand written medical notes. An ongoing exchange of medical documents between patient transport units and the facilities they serve would help reduce medical errors.