Medical Data Management: A brave new world.

Bridging the integration gap within medical data management.

By Michael Crosby.

For many hospitals or large-scale medical providers, the sheer volume and dispersion of clinical data throughout information technology systems can result in significant negative impact on clinicians, on information technology management, and on patients. Learn how a cutting-edge integrated data solution model promises to revolutionise the consolidation of inter-departmental data . Currently, healthcare service providers in Australia and Zealand are facing data storage, sharing and protection issues on three fronts.

Firstly, clinicians are forced to deal with numerous disparate systems often operated by different departments such as radiology, pathology ophthalmology, urology or dentistry.

Information technology (IT) departments fare little better as they try to manage, back-up and make secure patient clinical data that exists in different formats and locked to certain vendor systems. This all requires extra time and money as IT departments are sometimes also under increasing pressure to save costs or cut staff.

Finally, it is the patient that can suffer the most. They are forced to endure longer waiting times as they await for their data to be located and converted into usable formats. This problem is most serious when diagnosis are required to treat life-threatening or other serious problems, and most prevalent in remote locations or where tele-radioligy is being used.

If one considers PACS in isolation, the issue seems significant enough. But what about other types of image data, or even non-image data, administrative data and e-mail data? The issue gets much bigger. Add to this the facts that data is growing at exponential rates, that data complexity is increasing and that demand for data access, security and inter-operability and you have a real problem.

There are currently a myriad of useful data management tools, utilities and applications available to medical service providers in Australia and New Zealand. What no one has done – until now – is to combine these products into one effective, understandable and usable solution that is purpose-designed to solve medical data management issues.

The Imaging Solutions Medical Data Management (ISMDM) platform is a ground-breaking new development that addresses, and solves, all these issues simultaneously. It is an integrated model that bridges the gap between the latest hardware and software solutions, taking into account IHE, DICOM and HL7 standards for future inter-operability. Furthermore, it removes hardware, application and vendor lock-in to facilitate consolidation and collaboration of data sets within organisations and departments.

Clinicians are able to provide more accurate diagnosis by centrally accessing or mining patient data and leveraging other diagnostic tools and utilities – all without compromising data security or vendor lock-in. At the same time, IT Managers have one system that is hardware agnostic to manage for all data types and for archiving, backing-up.

ISMDM is uniquely effective it brings together into a partnership complimentary technology suppliers (including Bridgehead, Client Outlook, Forcare, Laurel Bridge and Softek) who have a proven track record in overseas markets.

No one else is able to offer these effective solutions as a completely integrated model.