Stylios Alton Trachanas provide a health care system that
generates a huge amount of information. The ability to share that information
quickly with other health care providers is vital. Health care information
systems integration results in many benefits to medical facilities, medical
professionals and to the patients themselves. Mobilizing patient medical
information through electronic means should be the goal of our entire health
care system.
Why Integration is Vital
Health care information systems integration saves money in
the long run through the enabling of information sharing. This eliminates the
duplication of services, prevents redundancy in equipment and the maintenance
of the equipment, and reduces the staffing needs within individual medical
facilities.
The incidence of mistakes is greatly reduced. If information
is inputted into a patient's account at many locations, it's possible that
errors can be made, including different types of errors at various locations.
If the information is entered correctly in one central database, errors are
greatly reduced. If there are errors in the medical records, it's much easier
to correct them at their origin.
Stylios Alton Trachanas says savings in time when health
care information systems are integrated is enormous. Medical information does
not have to be entered again, but simply retrieved from its original source.
Employee compensation is greatly reduced and numbers of personnel can be kept
to a minimum.
Better patient care results when health care information is
integrated. It can be accessed quickly by medical personnel, the risk of errors
is greatly diminished, and the patient's health care costs can be lowered. Most
importantly, the quality of patient care can be greatly improved as well as response
times to patients' needs.
Barriers to Integration
However, accomplishing the integration of health care
information is a daunting task. Even though the health care industry realizes
that integration is beneficial, actually bringing it about is not easy.
Individual facilities have their own systems in place. Changing them is
difficult and can result in a great amount of confusion, retraining for
employees, downtime, and large financial outlays. The solution is an HL7
interface engine.
Selecting and Implementing an HL7 Interface Engine
When selecting the HL7 provider, medical facilities must look
for one with a track record of stability and proven systems for working with
many standards.
There are many HL7 providers, but selecting the best one is
important for individual medical facilities. In general, HL7 software should:
Identify potential problems at the outset
Provide project consulting
Offer upgrades on a regular basis
Training
In addition, the company providing the HL7 interface engine
should provide training to the facility's staff so that all of the software
features can be fully utilized by the team working with the interface engine.
