News from HIMSS: Saturday

Posted by Mark Brousseau

Some headlines from the HIMSS health IT conference in Atlanta:

iSOFT showcases health IT solutions
iSOFT Group Limited will showcase its suite of solutions that focus on interoperability at the HIMSS health IT conference in Atlanta in the US from March 1-4, 2010.

iSOFT, which last year entered the important US market through its acquisition of Boston-based technology developer BridgeForward Software (re-named iSOFT Integration Systems), will at HIMSS demonstrate its solutions that are designed to address the requirements for ‘Meaningful Use’ under the US Government’s US$34 billion health IT stimulus package.

iSOFT solutions to be showcased at HIMSS include:

Health Information Exchange
iSOFT’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) solution provides healthcare organizations with access to clinical, financial and administrative data from any hospital information system across the organization. iSOFT’s HIE supports clinicians’ decisions at the point of care, reduces preventable errors and duplicative testing, and encourages best-practice medicine.

Health Intelligence
Health Intelligence (HINT) provides healthcare organizations with insights into organizational trends and statistics that supports informed decisions for future planning, the delivery of better-quality care and increased operational performance.

Integration
iSOFT Viaduct addresses the interoperability challenge faced by all organizations by providing a platform that enables software solutions to share information when needed and in the required form, ensuring seamless integration.

Solution Engineering
Health Studio provides a healthcare solution engineering environment to allow organizations to design, create and deploy their own solutions without needing to engage specialist vendors.

Patient Safety
iSOFT Patient Safety provides intelligence on safety and quality problems and best practices, empowering managers to make strategic improvements by providing an interactive evidence base.


Quest Software and HealthCast tout end-to-end clinical desktop and workflow solution
Quest Software, Inc. and HealthCast, Inc. will demonstrate an end-to-end clinical desktop and workflow solution for clinician access to protected healthcare information.

HealthCast’s eXactACCESS single sign-on and clinical workflow solution, coupled with Quest vWorkspace virtual desktop management solution, provides access to critical electronic health, order entry, and clinical documentation systems. As a result, these systems can be centrally managed to reduce costs and security concerns while increasing control of the clinical desktop environment.

“Our goal is to give physicians and clinicians the fast and easy access they need to their patient information while improving data security and reducing IT infrastructure and support costs,” said Simon Pearce, vice president and general manager of desktop virtualization, Quest Software.

vWorkspace and eXactACCESS automate clinician access to and management of virtual desktops and applications by eliminating the need to enter multiple passwords to disparate systems. HealthCast's unique proximity badge functionality automates the login to the virtual desktop and launches a clinician’s primary application based on who they are, and then navigates them to a default location within the application. When the badge is “tapped” again, the clinician’s virtual desktop and applications are disconnected so that clinicians can go to any other workstation in the enterprise, and securely pick up their desktop and applications exactly as they had left them with another “tap” of their badge.


California Health Information Exchange Networks interconnect
The Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange (HIE) is using Axolotl’s Elysium NHIN Gateway to connect to two California HIE networks - EKCITA in Tehachapi, CA and the Long Beach Network for Health in Southern CA, for exchange and sharing of critical clinical information.

This connectivity will be demonstrated at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase, supported by the California Health and Human Agency (CHHS), the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and the Federal Health Architecture (FHA) to illustrate the progress towards health IT interoperability, nationwide.

The Santa Cruz HIE, utilizing Axolotl’s Elysium Exchange solutions, will demonstrate the ability to query from and exchange data with other California HIEs. The demonstration will highlight how clinical data, based on national standards, is integrated into different physician workflows at the point of care - by the local systems that are chosen in each care setting.

“Patient care will be radically improved through this inter-HIE exchange capability,” said Bill Beighe, CIO of Santa Cruz HIE. “This demonstration will show that HIE-to-HIE information exchange is technically feasible and available now.”

The HL7 Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) being exchanged are standard electronic documents that include discrete data elements which can be extracted and incorporated into the receiving systems. Elysium is leveraging components of the IHE IT Infrastructure set of profiles, such as Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and Cross Community Access (XCA) to enable the transfer of the clinical data between connected communities. Multiple records will be exchanged to show that the process is general and not a special case.

“Axolotl participated with the Northrop Grumman consortium in the NHIN I project and in July 2009 did a live NHIN demo connecting five HIEs in California. Axolotl’s Elysium Gateway products that enable inter-HIE information exchange are available in our latest production platform and are being implemented. These products connect HIE Networks seamlessly to any other HIE either directly or via the NHIN,” said Anand Shroff, Vice President, Engineering, Axolotl.