There are many varied parts of a typical healthcare organisation. In fact, a healthcare organisation is really a bunch of different, but partially connected, businesses that share the same building and carpark. From Patient Administration, Emergency and Pathology to Radiology, Pharmacy and Maternity – the list goes on! However, this presents a challenge for healthcare organisations when met with the need to deliver a seamless patient experience.
For each department and unit, the clinical and operational needs vary quite significantly. To address the specific requirements of various departments, healthcare organisations have historically deployed a wide range of specialist IT solutions. This disparate approach means that many of these solutions do not put the patient at the centre of the system. In addition, many of these solutions were utilised for statutory reporting and billing commitments, rather than clinical or operational requirements.
In recent years, there has been a big push by health services to consolidate these specialised systems into ‘single’ electronic medical record (EMR) systems, which span the entire organisation. Health services have adopted these systems on the promise of a single integrated solution with no apparent integration risk. However, many of these solutions come with significant costs to the organisation and ultimately the taxpayer for public organisations.
Further, due to the level of change management required and the varied nature of each part of a healthcare organisation, EMRs have not always delivered on providing more clinical alignment, efficient patient care, level of integration or cost benefit originally anticipated.
There have been countless articles written by clinicians on the challenges of adopting such systems. The Australian Medical Association provides a good summary of the challenges, including inadequate or ineffective training and poor software design and usability, contributing to clinician burnout, as well as data privacy and security issues. Our Head of Data & Analytics Vivek Krishnan has also explored the challenges to access and consolidated data in various enterprise systems.
Miya Precision – a Modular EMR
To address these varied needs and challenges, we have developed Miya Precision.
Miya Precision allows healthcare organisations to take a different approach to evolving their service into a safe and efficient organisation through an incremental value-driven approach. Rather than a “big bang” deployment which throws out all the strengths (and weaknesses) of their existing systems and investments, Miya Precision enables healthcare organisations to incrementally improve parts of the organisation in a consistent and standardised way.
We take this approach by partitioning the Miya Precision platform into different modules that can be deployed incrementally when it makes clinical or commercial sense to do so. In other words, when there is a return on investment in terms of safety, time and cost.
The solution can also be configured to adapt to a wide variety of care settings and business processes. It is not a one size fits all approach; we work with healthcare organisations to build the right solution for them.
FHIR interoperability and analytics
A typical healthcare organisation today has an array of specialist systems interconnected by an integration engine. Many of these solutions use different Health Level-7 (HL7) formats or proprietary integration formats. While the intention is to provide standards and guidelines to help data be uniformly stored and moved, due to the many variances and adaptations, there is significant variation in how these systems are implemented and how the data can be shared.
As a result, integration of systems requires translation and data mapping and remains a time-consuming and costly process, falling short of overcoming integration challenges and meeting interoperability goals.
Miya Precision enables healthcare organisations, including those that represent a district or region that spans many health facilities, to consolidate their systems into the standardised Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format.
Miya Precision takes this transformation further than many other solutions by storing the information in native FHIR format and providing a stream of FHIR events optimised for real-time decision support. The platform is used to implement real-time safety and quality monitoring across the population. This is a different approach to traditional decision support in healthcare, which has historically been more point of care focused.
This unique approach unlocks all data across the organisation into a standardised open FHIR format, which can be streamed to other systems or warehouse and analytics solutions or accessed on demand via a FHIR API. In addition, it enables adoption of a wide range of other Miya Precision module capabilities, such as Patient Flow Management, Clinician Mobility, Intelligent Noting and more.
Clinician time and the importance of User Experience and Mobility
Many recent health software implementations have failed what we call “the clinician friendship test”. Implementing any new solution must first save clinicians time to enable them to further engage with the solution.
Miya Precision supports that objective by synthesising all information available about a patient and carefully presenting it to clinicians in a summarised risk-oriented fashion. This means clinicians do not have to wade through a mass of electronic information about the patient and potentially miss key or critical items that may result in patient harm if not addressed in a timely manner.
In addition, this consolidated information can be accessed via a mobile app that allows access whenever and wherever required.
Intelligent Noting
The advent of EMRs and eNoting solutions has led to a large increase in the volume of electronic documentation, both structured and unstructured. However, this approach has resulted in a very untapped, non-curated resource floating around in healthcare organisations.
Miya Language – a module of the Miya Precision platform – provides real-time, AI-driven analysis of this resource and enables automatic identification of key concepts in clinician notes. This identifies problems, procedures and findings which may not have been captured in a structured way. For example, automatically detecting a disease or syndrome a patient has from the free text notes and enabling the clinician to confirm that diagnosis with a single click. That diagnosis becomes part of the patient’s clinical record.
The structured concepts detected by Miya Language enables a range of improvements, including smart notifications with more context about the patient and more accurate coding of patient episodes.
What next
Before you make your next healthcare IT investment think about the value provided and the impact on the organisation. Miya Precision provides a scalable way of delivering process improvement, efficiency and safety across your organisation. Get in touch if you would like to find out more about how Alcidion can help your organisation evolve in an incremental value driven way.
Sam Blight is a Senior Product Manager at Alcidion