Breakthrough Healthcare Information System, Meeting Federal EHR Standards, Was Delivered in Just Nine Months.
InterSystems Corporation, a global leader in software for connected care, today announced that Mater Health Services has used the InterSystems HealthShare™ healthcare informatics platform to rapidly develop an eHealth Record for expectant mothers.
By offering an electronic alternative to the paper-based Pregnancy Health Record currently issued by Queensland Health to public maternity hospitals, the new system is already benefiting both patients and clinicians. In a recent example, when a pregnant woman was rushed to Mater's Pregnancy Assessment and Observation Unit, Mater staff were able to expedite her critical treatment by having immediate access to the patient's obstetric record and latest test results due to her private obstetrician electronically sharing the information through his practice system.
Mater's Chief Information Officer, Mal Thatcher, said Mater Shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) will ultimately integrate with and support Mater's maternity community, both patients and healthcare providers. "What we have developed and implemented is a repository for obstetric information with access for maternity patients, internal clinicians, and participating external healthcare providers."
InterSystems has a global track record of success in developing and supporting health information networks in communities, regions and nations. InterSystems HealthShare enables sharing of patient information across multiple systems, and provides active analytics to drive informed action.
InterSystems' technology for rapid application development enabled Mater to complete the federally funded eHealth project in nine months, with three months for design and just six months for implementation. Having successfully delivered the project prior to the agreed 30 June 2012 deadline, Mater Health Services has now been contracted for a further transition project to formalise a national Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard for obstetric information.
"HealthShare allowed us to rapidly put together a system that, with another technology platform, would have required more programmers and a lot more work," said Mater's Integration Specialist Andy Richards. "HealthShare comes with a series of pre-built and pre-tested building blocks, like support for the CDA standard, Secure Messaging Delivery adaptors, and transformation engines for clinical data, so we didn't have to develop any of them ourselves."
Mater uses HealthShare to communicate with general practitioners and visiting medical officers to receive specialist obstetric information via the Secure Messaging Delivery technical specification developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority and published by Standards Australia. Obstetric information is sent from external clinicians' systems using the HL7 CDA standard. HealthShare transforms incoming CDA files, which include three different interpretations of the CDA standard, into a single standard document type and extracts relevant information to create an obstetric patient record. The original CDA file is attached to the record for future reference.
HealthShare then combines the obstetric patient record with information from a range of other Mater systems, such as patient registration, pharmacy and pathology, to create the Mater Shared EHR. This is available to external clinicians and maternity patients via existing Mater Provider Portals and a new Mater Patient Portal developed as part of the National eHealth Record System.
Mater also used HealthShare to develop an interface to the national Healthcare Identifiers Service operated by Medicare Australia. The interface was one of the first to gain accreditation under the Compliance, Conformance and Accreditation program operated by National E-Health Transition Authority. Mater has now obtained over 80,000 Individual Health Identifiers, which it has matched and verified against existing patient information and added to the Mater Shared EHR using HealthShare's inbuilt technology for the disambiguation of personal records.
"By supporting Australian connected healthcare services and standards, InterSystems is accelerating the delivery of systems under government electronic health record initiatives," said Steve Garrington, Group Commercial Director at InterSystems. "Mater Health Services is a model for other organisations seeking to provide secure and consistent access to regional and national infrastructure such as the National eHealth Record System."
About Mater Health Services
Mater provides exceptional care to more than 500,000 patients each year. A Queensland icon, the not-for-profit provider of health services operates seven hospitals, a medical research institute, pathology and pharmacy businesses – all of which are underpinned by community support through the Mater Foundation.
Through its collocation of private and public facilities, Mater is able to meet the needs of the community by reinvesting any revenue from the business back into the provision of health care services.
Founded in 1906 by the Sisters of Mercy, Mater's board of directors and staff have since upheld the philosophy and Mission of offering compassionate care to the sick and needy according to the values of mercy, dignity, care, commitment and quality.
With more than 7500 exceptional staff and volunteers, a commitment to clinical care, research and education, Mater is able to offer a comprehensive range of services to meet the needs of our community.
About InterSystems
InterSystems Corporation is a global leader in software for connected care, with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and offices in 25 countries. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a strategic healthcare informatics platform for information exchange and analytics within a hospital network, and across a community, region or nation. InterSystems CACHÉ® is the world's most widely used database system in clinical applications. InterSystems Ensemble® is a platform for rapid integration and the development of connectable applications. InterSystems TrakCare™ is an Internet -based unified healthcare information system that rapidly delivers the benefits of an Electronic Patient Record (TrakCare is not available in the United States).
InterSystems' products are used by thousands of hospitals and laboratories worldwide, including all of the top ten hospitals on the Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals as rated by U.S. News and World Report.
