Strong Integration Vital as Telehealth Initiatives Gain Prominence

[Alexandra Casey]

Telehealth concepts are expanding within the healthcare industry as organizations are faced with meeting the needs of their healthcare community and driving industry factors while being tasked with less internal resources.  Furthermore for those hospitals that are dealing with diverse geographical locations, delivering advanced, state of the art patient care can be a challenge.

Telehealth concepts solve many of the unique challenges listed above.
One specific telehealth program can be seen in the hospital intensive care units.  The need to staff the ICU by specialty ICU physicians known as Intensivists pose significant challenges for many hospitals.  Not only is the population of these physicians small they tend to practice medicine in large, metropolitan cities leaving the rural hospitals challenged with staffing. 

Delivering this specialized level of care is critical to successful patient outcomes.

To combat this challenge head on, Avera Health in South Dakota instituted a Telehealth “eICU” care program offering remote care by ICU specialists to over 66 rural communities and 33 hospital facilities across five states.  The project has been extremely successful with significant patient benchmarks and outcomes that continue to trend upward.

Importance of integration

While the project above may be summarized eloquently, sharing and exchanging data with the numerous remote locations back to the main HCIS was quite the project. Delivering specific patient information from the bedside to the hospital HCIS was necessary to provide real-time, informed patient care.  By using standard HL7 feeds from the vital sign monitoring devices at the bedside the Intensivist could provide this level of care.  While this model could be accomplished with point to point interfaces the price point would be significant. 

Avera Health leveraged their investment in the Summit Express Connect interface engine as their integration foundation and the technology has played a significant role in the Avera “eICU” program.  Avera has been able to reuse their existing interfaces to map, filter and route information between all receiving and delivering systems. This approach has provided an unprecedented cost savings for the organization.

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