A group of Ontario hospitals is preparing to turn on a transaction-processing tool that will automatically route patient data to approximately 200 physicians after patients have been discharged.
Grey Bruce Health Services, which includes 11 hospitals in Owen Sound and the surrounding area,
is expecting to begin offering the ability to transmit HL7 radiology and other reports through a partnership with Toronto-based Xenos Corp. The company will be integrating its GoXML, which collects structured data in a variety of industry standards, with its five-year-old Cerner Patient Care System, which manages documents within the hospital group.
Rob Croft, Grey Bruce’s
corporate director of systems integration, says the idea is to replace the slow delivery of paper-based reports to physicians, who often don’t get information as quickly as they need it from the hospitals. Besides the radiology reports, the system will deliver electronically clinic notes, lab test results and even notes taken through dictation, he says.
It was important Grey Bruce have a solution with enough flexibility to allow employees to make changes as physicians come and go, Croft says.
“”We didn’t want a back-end programmer to spend all his time re-programming this,”” he says. “”We wanted to have a front end that we could manipulate this stuff and send it different ways.””
The organization would like to start moving away from paper-based reports, but some physicians are still holding out, Croft says. Stuart Butts, Xenos’s CEO, says they could have it both ways.
“”It’s very easy for physicians who want it paper-based — they just have to hit print,”” he says.
Xenos’s GoXML Integration Solution, which includes Registry, Communication Server, and Messaging, was designed to allow the secure exchange of information over the Internet and to streamline business processes across multiple organizations, Butts says. Getting Grey Bruce up and running will be basically flipping a switch, he says.
“”They’re making the information available where it’s wanted as it’s available,”” he says. “”Any practitioner who does that is going to be able to offer better patient care.””
Once GoXML is integrated with the Cerner system, Croft says physicians may need to figure out how they’ll be sorting the range of electronic documents coming their way.
“”They’re going to have a little bit of work to do,”” he says. “”In the last six months they have been the major pushers on this . . . that’s primarily why we see a need to move.””
Earlier this year, Xenos formed a division focused on health-care.