Midterm question # 3

Computerized Database of Baptist Hospital

Computerized Patient Records .Benefits/Problems SolvedBaptist Health Systems (BHS) of South Florida has embarked on a long-term journey towards Computerized Patient Records (CPR). As part of their "continuum of care" effort, Baptist Health Systems will evolve from a series of hospitals to an Integrated Delivery System that also provides well-care. As a result, they will need to manage all clinical information generated as their organization(s) interacts with its patients and other customers.
During their growth, Baptist is required to manage diverse information across very distinct clinical disciplines including diabetes, radiology, pharmacology and pathology. Typically, different vendors specialize in different aspects of healthcare informatics. Although this provides very good departmental solutions, it fosters a sub-optimal enterprisefunctionality, for example, failing to produce consistent identification of a patient across multiple hospitals (or even across different departments within a hospital). Direct access to clinical information is non-existent in these stove-pipe systems. Data is re-populated across the different stovepipe systems through message exchange. The end-result is an inefficient and non-scaleable solution for creating computerized patient records.
Unfortunately, there is not a single information system vendor that covers the full spectrum of managing information throughout the continuum of care. The Baptist Health Systems approach allows the best vendor solution to be implemented for a particular clinical discipline, provided that their solution adheres to an Information Architecture which addresses the shortcomings of the previous generation information systems.
The Information Architecture is equivalent to a blueprint that enforces components of a building to be constructed in a predefined, consistent fashion. Just like each of these building components are guided by standards and standard interfaces, components in the Information Architecture of a healthcare organization must be defined by a set of standard interfaces.
Baptist Health Systems is basing their Computerized Patient Record systems on CORBA and in turn are actively promoting the standardization of their interfaces through the OMG process. Thus far, BHS has signed two contracts for OMA compliant information systems with two separate vendors. BHS has direct access to the CORBA interfaces (IDL) of these systems and expect the CPR to be built as a collection of services/components, each with a set of interfaces. BHS has made OMG conformance an absolute requirement in it's information selection process, and they expect to sign several more multi-million dollar vendor contracts within the upcoming months.