I am a Technical Lead with a company which specializes in Bio-Medical Informatics. I routinely perform software design & programming for IT applications to be used in medical field. Few of the applications in which I contributed are CANSYS (Informatics application for Cancer screening), FHSYS (Informatics application for Familial Hypercholesterolemia screening) and INFOHaem web application which empowers the Molecular Screening Services of our company.
Like most domains, medical practice has also modernized itself with latest information technology. IT is widely used in all specialties of medicine and surgery. Let me pick an example to see how IT could improve the patient care in a hospital. In Sweden, every person has his personal identity number and his personal details including his health records digitalized and uploaded in a network system. When he enters any health centre, with his identification number, the doctor can retrieved detailed information of his medical history including the past surgeries, major events and any ongoing treatment details from the system. On top of that, doctors from different specialties/departments are able to view the patient’s medical history at the same time.. This implies that a patient with abdominal pain need not have to make multiple trips to different departments in the hospital, from his general practitioner (GP) to the radiologist, to the pathologist, and back to his GP, in order to get his prescription for the simple pain. The bottom line is we need inter specialty cooperation, an integrated approach to a patient which is made possible by medical informatics system.
Medical informatics, or clinical informatics, focuses on using information processing to improve medical care delivery. It covers various applications including using information technology within the clinical setting for medical billing, patient and resource scheduling, and patient care.
There are various methods by which Medical IT applications can contribute to the day-to-day practice and working of the medical professionals. This includes:
• Appointment and Scheduling process: Medical informatics applications improve and simplify the process of making appointment and scheduling process for hospitals and clinics. This is done via software systems (e.g. Hospital Information System, Radiography Informatics System) with dedicated modules for fixing date & time, providing notifications on overlapping and conflicting appointments, sending reminders.
• Patient Data Management System (PDMS): This simplifies and organizes the collection of all consultation-related information, tracking administrative details, such as the time of the consultation, the patient and providers names. Patient case sheets, images and heart and lung sounds associated with telemedicine consultations can be captured and added to the patient's electronic record.
• Billing: Dedicated Module for billing streamlines the reimbursement process for medical field. Insurance payers allow electronic billing, where bills are submitted through the medical apps and reimbursement is made quickly within a few days, which is satisfying to the patient & family members.
• Integration of information across different department: medical informatics solution such as HIS address the complex needs of various departments in a hospital. They manage the data from clinic, outpatient, inpatient, nursing, laboratory, finance department, pharmacy, also the radiology and pathology departments in a more integrated and efficient manner. The hospitals that have adopted and implemented HIS have various advantages including access to quick and reliable information, patients’ records having details about their treatment, operation, drug allergies etc.
One of Our company’s medical informatics solution- INFOHaem v2.2 application has been developed in compliance with HL7 standard and integrated with HIS (Hospital Information System) of the client hospitals for inter-operability. The system provides the clinician’s flexibility of registering the subject from any place and access the report of particular subject. (Web enabled apps). This has made our Molecular Screening services more efficient and effective for our valued customers. The following are the salient features of the solution developed by us:
Clinician can directly Login into INFOHaem or to HIS of his/her hospital to register subject and record subject’s clinical details. (Clinical Data Collection submodule of Clinician module)
The details of all subjects registered in client’s HIS are transferred automatically into INFOHaem system , without user intervention (Web Services).
Medical Research & Services Laboratory scientists who receive the samples perform the wet laboratory procedures on high density microarray chips; subsequently conduct the molecular/genetic analysis. They Clinico-Molecular Report will be sent to the HIS automatically after proper approval by Chief Medical Officer throughWeb Services.
Clinician can login to INFOHaem or to the hospital HIS system to view the CMR of a particular subject to provide post testing counseling on a scheduled date and time (View Reports and appointment module)
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| CMR - Clinico Molecular Report of Familial Hypercholesterolemia |
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| The University of Michigan Medical Center, consistently rated by the U.S. News and World Report as one of the top hospitals in the United States. |
References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics
2. http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/
3. New uses for computer in medical education, clinical practice, and patient safety in the US and Japan, Progress in informatics No.2 ,pp 3-15 (2005)
By Kishore Kumar, Software Engineer
