Enabling A New Era in Healthcare Delivery
Information technology has increased consumer awareness and expectations for high quality healthcare. Well informed patients have created additional business requirements for their treating clinicians. Medical computing can serve the need for fast access to pertinent information anywhere and at anytime.
Facilitating the flow of information is key to improving management of healthcare resources. This is important to ensure industry-wide use of best practices and to achieve the consistent quality-of-care that informed consumers now demand.
To be useful, computer tools should increase a doctor's agility and competitiveness, improve productivity and provide fast return on investment at low risk. These utitilities should not interfere with workflow routines. They should speed-up the pace of care provision and raise the level of patient satisfaction.
Computers, networked to the world-wide-web, can rapidly link to a vast array of peer-reviewed and evidenced-based expert opinions that map to best practices, treatments and managment strategies to improve the quality of care.
A comprehensive assessment can mitigate the risks of medical errors of ommission. Additional benefits can include documentation of medical necessity and the capture of encounter data at the point-of-service. Coupling such information to secured electronic medical record repositories can also provide practice profiles for fiscal forecasters, for credentialing oversight regulatory agencies, and medical policy makers.
The possibility exists to supply and access information for patient evaluation to consultants and claims adjudicators using handheld mobile personal digital assistants with wireless technologies. Through collaborative developments, onboard coding systems will soon facilitate billing for service, and rapid payment by electronic fund transfer, as the technology is used to assess and deliver care. All this while providing continuing education and enhancing practices.
According to Investor's Business Daily, 05/25/2001,
Personal digital assistants -- hand-held electronic devices that allow physicians to retrieve clinical data and access patient information -- are "finding a place in exam rooms next to the 'Physicians' Desk Reference'". Physicians use PDAs to carry out numerous tasks, such as storing patient insurance information and searching for drug interaction data...
PDAs save doctors time and keep better patient records than paper filing, which leads to higher quality patient management. A variety of firms have entered the PDA market. EPocrates Inc., a company that produces PDA software containing disease and health plan information, estimates that more than 250,000 doctors and other health workers use its products, with an additional 25,000 new users signing up each month. Meanwhile, AllScripts Healthcare Solutions has created software that allows doctors to write prescriptions, make notes about patient visits and look up information on drugs and diseases. All this said, the use of PDAs is currently "far from Utopian".
There is little, if any, integration of the computer technology yet, that links information directly to patient care, leaving doctors buried in paperwork and bogged down in time-consuming -- and costly -- dictation and transcription. An American Hospital Association study released earlier this month found that paperwork adds at least 30 minutes to every hour of patient care.
IatroCom is developing a system that "does quite a lot ... talks to the payer's systems, talks to your office and helps manage patients"
With simplified integration into any clinical practice setting, IatroCom, an on-line application service provider, can instantly deliver valuable decision support information to care givers' web-enabled computer browsers for easy use during encounter situations. Constellation-Voyager™, its expert system, relational knowledge-base and terminology framework, is distributed to quickly collect, capture, correlate and analyze clinical data at the point-of-care. It's unobtrusive design assists providers at what they customarily do to deliver appropriate care. It does so in a convenient and modern way. It supports a wide variety of specialty disciplines.
This Internet-based application service readily provides valuable medical information in an unobtrusive display. Its features help to gather, compare, aggregate and assess medical symptoms and signs during the problem evaluation process. The unit enhances a doctor’s encounter and meets his business requirements while saving valuable time. It is beneficial for students in training and enables researchers. It also links to sites offering continuing education. It simplifies coding and payer issues as well. The device instantly integrates information gathered during the encounter with computerized medical record databases if desire and is compliant with industry standards for electronic data interhange.
To accommodate an ever-advancing base of health care knowledge, IatroCom's cost-effective and highly efficient system designs empower fast update implementations behind-the-scenes. Hosted by dependable, versatile and well-trained medical informaticists, the web site is continuously maintained and refined to keep pace with accelerating information changes in the medical field.
The credible professionals who support this project have a long-term commitment to support the evolutionary growth of standardized vocabularies including:
* SNOMED-RT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) * LOINC (Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes) * HL7 (Health Level Seven) * HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
Regulations Governing Privacy, Security and Electronic Transactions
Intraoperability with vocabularies required for reimbursement and other administrative needs has been linked during development. To this end the structure includes:
* ICD (International Classification of Disease) * CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) * HCPCS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Common Procedural Coding System)
Additionally, the vocabulary is constructed to provide adequate specificity in a principled model that is sufficient for fact-based care. The vocabulary mix includes mappings to these sets. The framework is designed to support day-to-day operations of payor organizations. This terminology solution accepts localizations, facilitating their translation to more standard clinical phrasing.
Constellation Voyager™ enables real-time electronic data collection, analysis, and secured publication of structured clinical information gathered at the point of encounter. Its knowledge-bases cover thousands of diagnoses and their weighted finding relationships. The system suggests significant studies that are likely to help establish or further justify a set of differential diagnoses based upon the selected findings. This web-based tool has been built to quickly distribute meaningful, contextual and useful medical information for on-line medical problem evaluation using convenient standard computer browsers.
