Tag: FHIR

Rush University Medical Center embraced cloud transformation for internal operations and organizational needs as well as in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Rush analytics team worked with the city of Chicago department of public health to create a working reference implementation of a cloud-based public health analytics hub. This hub aggregates, combines, and analyzes multi-hospital data related to patient admissions, discharges and transfers, electronic lab reporting, hospital capacity, and clinical care documents of COVID-19 patients receiving care in and across Chicago hospitals.

Health information is generally disorganized, unstructured, and stored in various formats, making it impractical to trace patient history and promote the exchange of information on a national scale with other health professionals. A solution to this issue is the creation of a unique patient registry, which can be defined as a repository of retrospective, current, and prospective information of the patient in digital format. The main objective of this registry is to promote integrated, continuous, efficient, quality health care. In addition, the registry needs to be accessible and available to different health institutions. When building these registries, it’s necessary to use standards to define not only how the information is structured, but also how it can be retrieved and shared among the different HIS in a safe, scalable, cost-efficient way. This can be done using blockchain.

Imagine: Transforming the patient and caregiver experience by streamlining health providers and administrative staff interactions and calculating risk score and clinical decision support systems to offer clinicians actionable insights at the point of care. Establishing healthcare data interoperability interfaces, like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR), can help empower patients and improve their care.

As patients navigate the healthcare system, their records should be easily transferrable between all organizations to ensure continuity of care. Value-based payment programs and increasing consumerism have driven the need for prompt and complete access to clinical information in healthcare systems around the world.