InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect Cloud gives medical scale-up company a fast and scalable cloud interoperability capability without a large up-front investment.
My Emergency Doctor (MED), Australia’s first telemedicine service staffed by specialist emergency doctors, has implemented InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect Cloud.
The integration is intended to quickly and cost-effectively provide systems interoperability with a major suburban hospital to support a virtual overnight supervision service by facilitating virtual board rounds between emergency department clinicians and emergency specialists (FACEMs) overnight.
This initiative aims to improve key performance indicators such as Transfer of Care (ToC) and length of stay.
Purchased as a pay-as-you-grow cloud service, HealthShare Health Connect Cloud will also provide enhanced interoperability for MED’s other telemedicine services in the future, with InterSystems partner Fluffy Spider Technologies providing ongoing support.
This will enable MED to serve larger and more sophisticated healthcare providers and further improve clinical productivity and patient experience.
MED has used a secure file-sharing service to integrate its electronic medical record (EMR) system with the systems of its clients, typically regional hospitals with 6 to 8-bed emergency departments (EDs).
However, supporting a new virtual board round service for a 60-bed ED at a major suburban hospital required a more efficient and streamlined approach.
The hospital preferred to interoperate via the commonly used HL7 messaging standard.
After signing an agreement with InterSystems, MED implemented an interoperability solution using HealthShare Health Connect Cloud within two months, with future integrations expected to be even faster.
“MED is a growing company, and we needed a fast solution to meet our expanding needs,” said Ben Rhodes, Head of Technology, MED.
“HealthShare Health Connect Cloud offers a scalable solution with a low barrier to entry, perfectly aligning with our growth trajectory. Initially, the most important benefit was meeting the required timeline by leveraging the hospital’s existing HL7 capability. With HL7 interoperability we can receive more information more quickly and create a better clinical workflow. If something happens, we get the data immediately, and a nurse doesn’t need to check it. Now that we have completed the first HL7 integration, we can expand it to multiple customers. And we can integrate with FHIR or use the InterSystems FHIR Server to create a FHIR repository as well.”
Darren Jones, Country Manager, Australia and New Zealand, InterSystems, said: “With our cloud interoperability solution, we are delighted to help healthcare providers, medical start-ups and scale-ups like My Emergency Doctor overcome the systems integration barriers to innovative connected care solutions.
“Without making a large up-front investment, MED can quickly and cost-effectively meet its integration challenges one at a time, leveraging the latest interoperability technology and healthcare data standards. MED is also leveraging our partner network and will collaborate with Fluffy Spider Technologies, one of the region’s first InterSystems partners for HealthShare Health Connect Cloud, for ongoing technical support.”