NeoTool — Singular Focus, Healthcare Integrated

Posted in Healthcare Integration

Last week the joint workshop on HCMDSS (High Confidence Medical Devices, Software, and Systems) and Medical Device Plug-and-Play (MD PnP) held a conference on medical device interfacing. The meeting was entitled, “Improving Patient Safety through Medical Device Interoperability and High Confidence Software.”

Tim Gee, who is the Principal Consultant over at Medical Connectivity Consulting, wrote up an interesting “raw notes summary” of one of the panel discussions: Clinical Need for Interoperability

Interesting quotes in his post:

“Hospitals today are not safe – if you go into the hospital, take someone with you. One of the biggest problems is that technology advancement has outstripped the infrastructure (how the technology is deployed and used) to ensure safety. The technology with perhaps the biggest potential impact on patient safety is the interoperability of medical devices.”

…

Best practices for healthcare integration or interoperability include:

• Clinical requirements are necessary to understand what a complex medical device system is intended to do
• “Interoperability” must be described using rich set of scenarios/use cases
• Must address safety, security, effectiveness
• Look at current clinical challenges and hazards, mitigations, future solutions and new risks

…

Jackson also noted a structural weakness that was a theme of the conference: that interoperability is usually a post-planning, post-market thought. Consequently, the solution is usually compromised by:

• Unreliable performance, slow (and too frequent) software updates
• Poor vendor ability to support integrated systems
• Poor design with multiple points of failure that are – what do you know, prone to failure.

NeoTool provides HL7 connectivity for Medical Device Manufacturers.

Last 5 posts by Dave Shaver

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• HL7 Dates and Times - July 25th, 2008
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• Hospitals Allowed to Pay for EMR Interfaces and Not Violate Stark - June 3rd, 2008