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Business News | Dubai | December
6, 2006
Implementation of IHE standard to boost efficiency
at hospitals
By Debasree
S., Contributing Editor
(ArabMedicare.com) The global healthcare industry is ready
to adopt the latest innovations in IT to boost efficiency and achieve
sustainable profits in an increasingly competitive market.
"Most hospitals around the world represent islands of information
with partially redundant data sets which need to be integrated to lower
costs, expedite diagnosis and reduce errors," said Mr. Joseph J
Franke, Cardiac Clinical and Research Systems Coordinator, from the King
Abdulaziz Cardiac Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Speaking to ArabMedicare.com on the sidelines of the Global Health Care
Expansion Congress taking place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Dubai
(December 4-5), Mr. Joseph said : "In the past medical staff would
just order whatever equipment/technology they needed, to solve their
immediate needs. But trends are changing and hospital staff, now work as
a team, to implement a strategic plan focused on the Integration of
Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).
Mr. Franke has 25 years of cardiac, administrative, clinical and
research experience and was the principal author of a recent, fully
funded proposal to upgrade National Guard wide enterprise healthcare
systems in Saudi Arabia. In his keynote address at the Health Care
Expansion Congress focusing on "Proper Integration of Cardiac IT
Solutions in the Healthcare Enterprise", Mr. Franke emphasized on
the massive transformation in the quality of healthcare services that
can be achieved through the implementation of the IHE standard.
Data from cardiac enterprise systems can be shared to improve,
standardize and expedite the reporting process. Information can be
shared online to build H&P, consults, procedure reports, discharge
summaries and clinic reports. And finally the data from reporting can be
used for quality improvement, benchmarking and monitoring of stratified
outcomes and research.
Focusing on Cardiac Specialty Systems in the context of the IHE (Since
more medicare dollars are spent for heart failure than for any other
diagnosis worldwide), Mr. Franke highlighted the need for specialized
'open door' Congestive Heart Failure clinics with a good database that
monitor efficacy. Citing the model of the Canadian National CHF
registry, where the implementation of the IHE system saw a 80 per cent
reduction in admissions, Mr. Franke said that online data could be used
effectively for real time monitoring of outcomes.
The adoption of IHE standards could lead to outcome models which could
in turn be used for decision-making, informed consent, mortality and
morbidity review and institutional/physician performance assessment. Mr.
Franke while focusing on the advantages of the IHE system pointed to a
particular German medical centre which used FMRI/contrast Echo - new
tests used to detect viable heart muscle pre-surgery. The centre used
integrated data to compare different tests and decided (based on the
data) that the MRI and the contrast Echo were far more beneficial than
nuclear medicine since it would save the patient from radiation.
The implementation of the IHE standard, Mr. Franke said, was even more
crucial in Saudi Arabia which recorded a 100 per cent occupancy in most
hospitals leading to delays in compiling medical records, witnessed
uncontrolled coronary risk factors like diabetes, required a team of
medical experts and a rapid growth of population (8 per cent). The use
of integrated data compiling systems like the IHE would not only reduce
costs but also improve the efficacy of healthcare services in the
country by shortening length of stays and making beds more available to
patients who require them, he added.
Source: ArabMedicare.com
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IT
innovations could be used
