Laszlo Gasztonyi, CTO
As the evolution of the healthcare information market continues to accelerate, the changes that ensue will increase the opportunities for departmental and enterprise clinical workflow solutions that meet the needs for improved care; and interoperability will continue to be a major requirement to drive down costs. Often, this interoperability is achieved by using two polar-opposite strategies of either ripping/replacing existing infrastructure or by providing an “overlay” solution to the existing infrastructure.
Rip & Replace
When choosing a “rip-and-replace” strategy, the healthcare organization loses its investment in previously acquired equipment, staff knowhow, and often the “best of breed” functionality they originally sought. The perceived advantage is that a single vendor replacement solution will fix interoperability issues moving forward and simplify operations by reducing vendor participation. Unfortunately, these in many ways lead to stagnation in innovations.
Overlay
An alternative to ripping out dissimilar systems and replacing them with a single vendor solution is the overlay method. In the overlay method, existing infrastructure, as well as staff knowledge and functionality of those systems is preserved. An orchestration system, when overlaid on top of the existing systems, acts as the information translator from one system to another, preserving investments. The MEDxConnect solution provides this overlay orchestration ability by connecting to legacy systems and creating workflows that translate and efficiently distribute information from the source to the point of patient care. MEDxConnect also provides robust analytics so that as new workflows are introduced, data is collected and presented, so that true healthcare improvements can be evaluated, aiding in all stakeholder adoption.
Workflow Orchestration and Single-point Integration
Compressus believes that the healthcare organizations are moving from the monolithic IT solutions to “de-coupled” componentized solutions. This is exemplified in the radiology department’s Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). For the last two decades, PACS has been the medical imaging solution that usually came from a single image acquisition device provider. They remain fairly closed systems consisting of an archive, a viewer(s), and a worklist that is driven by rigid workflow. However, thought leaders are realizing that cost control, productivity gains, and improved patient satisfaction can be made by decoupling a PACS with an optimized independent archive, a viewer(s), and a workflow solution to provide an enterprise wide orchestration of information and work assignment. Through de-coupling, pricing power shifts away from the monolithic PACS vendor and towards the buyer. The best archive, the best viewer, and the best workflow orchestration engine are procured in a fashion that is modular. This modular nature allows the healthcare organization to purchase the best components for their needs, at their own pace. It also allows the solutions to be used across multiple departments, in a tailored fashion. MEDxConnect is the workflow orchestration and single point integration capability that provides superior multi-departmental programmable workflow orchestration. MEDxConnect is also a platform with multiple displays and analytics for reporting to all healthcare stakeholders.
