From the January/February 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Of vital importance, the information could be retrieved online, when it is needed from the source of truth (i.e. EMR). This assures that this information is up-to-date, and it eliminates the need from each consuming system (i.e. PACS or applications) to maintain copies of the information. The EMR vendor would provide a Web-based application programmers interface (API) between PACS and EMR that would allow trusted systems to retrieve the information in a secure, standard and reliable manner. The Web API would enable real-time or near real-time retrieval of clinical information from the EMR by other applications (i.e.PACS).
Actually, this concept of tapping the EMR for clinical information is not new. Interviews of radiologists frequently uncover the concept of volume versus value, as in less volume of studies read in favor of more value in each case interpreted.
Radiologists will readily admit that the images are not the whole “picture.” While there is recognition that most of the truly useful clinical information is in the EMR, radiologists will complain that that data is difficult to access. While PACS vendors are now being asked to launch the EMR in patient context, the radiologists are also asking for some methodology to make searching for the relevant data both easy and fast.
There are challenges to bringing this concept to reality. The process has to be largely automated. All radiologists recognize that there is useful clinical information in their EMRs, but they won’t routinely search for that information if they have to work too hard. Launching the EMR in patient context is not going to be a successful approach, because the clinical data is not effectively consumed by simply launching the EMR.
The search process cannot simply be a contextual launch into the binder of clinical data on the patient. What is needed is a search application that assembles information specific to a clinical environment. The search process must be automated and sensitive to relevance. The search process must be based on a rules engine that can convert the clinical setting into search criteria. This effectiveness and the efficiency of this type of search will improve over time.
The process of searching one or more data repositories and assembling the summary information must be very fast. There will be challenges to meeting this performance expectation. This is not like moving image data, but the process requires searching a massive volume of unstructured data, and the EMR is not necessarily good at assembling the clinical data according to clinical context (reasons for ordering a radiology study).
