Seamless Integration for Quality Care
There used to be times when for specialty surgical procedures and treatments Indians were traveling overseas, followed by people coming to metros for similar treatments. Now, tier-2 and tier-3 cities are gaining ground and super-specialty hospitals are coming across the country. The major healthcare providers have big plans to set up hospitals in various corners of India. Health care delivery has evolved dramatically in the last decade or so, but the same cannot be said same about Healthcare IT (HIT).
Major OEMs are now shipping equipment that is compliant with healthcare standards like DICOM and HL7. Hospitals need to deploy IT solutions that will share patient clinical records and images portable across various stakeholders within and outside the hospitals such as doctors, administrators, paramedics, insurance providers, etc.
Even though there is a lot of progress on the front of HIT, still you will find major hospitals across India have “islands” of information that can not be interconnected resulting in the manual transportation of data diluting the efficacy of automation. In the last 2-3 years hospitals have started understanding the importance of HIT and started giving due importance to HIT that it deserves.
The technology for acquiring, storing, retrieving, displaying, and distributing medical images and patient information has changed dramatically in the last few years. The new buzzword is “Enterprise solution” in medical images and hospital information management solutions, wherein digital images from radiology, cardiology, and many other Imaging modalities are seamlessly linked with information from clinical information systems and other databases, and they are accessed seamlessly from a single point.
One of the issues that plagued the progress of Hospital Information System / Radiology Information System / Picture Archiving & Communication Systems (HIS/CIS/PACS) integration was a matter of interaction language between Health Level-7 (HL7) and DICOM. The broker solved this barrier—a software and hardware device that accepts HL7 messages from the HIS and RIS then translates the data to produce DICOM messages for transmission to the PACS. The broker provides support for patient and exam information from the RIS to flow to the modality with the help of the DICOM Modality Worklist. With DICOM protocols the patient images generated on the medical equipment are transferred to PACS. These Patient Images in PACS has seamless integration with Clinical Information Systems and/or Hospital Information System.
