From the May 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Interoperability with other systems is a critical capability of the infusion management system. Doing this in a way that is seamless to the health care system is fundamental. An infusion management system must be able to feed the EMR with complete and high quality information. Whether exporting or importing data, the infusion management system acts as a partner in supporting the clinician’s need to deliver timely, high quality care. Its data interfaces need to be both consistent with those exposed by the EMR and malleable enough to deal with variations, without the need for middleware to negotiate the differences. The next generation infusion management system must contain its own middleware and its interfaces must be developed in close cooperation with evolving standards and with the leaders within the health care IT community.
Finally, the next generation infusion management system must be capable of supporting ongoing changes in health care and movement from the hospital to the clinic and home. Though the devices may vary across the care continuum, the system must provide the infrastructure that unifies their operation within a common platform. In this environment, cybersecurity becomes increasingly significant, as does the system’s ability to operate in the cloud and over less reliable networks. Though these challenges had not been considered in the past, overcoming them enables the infusion management system to operate in a connected care environment that extends across the care continuum.
The demands on health systems to improve outcomes while reducing costs will continue to increase. This creates new opportunities for vendors to provide innovative solutions that enable this transformation. Infusion management is no longer just about delivering fluids, it is about turning information into knowledge used to inform clinical decisions throughout the infusion delivery process. With recent advances in technology, the time is right to make infusion systems more intelligent, with the goal of reducing errors, improving outcomes and driving down the overall cost of care.
About the author: George W. Gray is CTO & VP of Software and Information Systems for Ivenix, Inc., a venture-backed medical technology company with a vision to transform infusion therapy in every care setting.Back to HCB News
