This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our and .
Improving patient care lies at the heart of eHealth interoperability. Yet, delivering the best possible outcomes depends on carefully planned and implemented systems integration and reliable health information governance. We had the chance to speak to Di Mantell, General Manager Facilities Management at Fiona Stanley Hospital in WA about overcoming boundaries in eHealth interoperability, ‘source of truth’ issues and garnering clinician engagement.
IIR Healthcare: The Fiona Stanley Hospital will feature full integration of different ehealthcare systems across the hospital. How have you been approaching interoperability? What do you look for in systems? And where do you sit in the ‘best of breed functionality vs. single vendor’ discussion?
Di Mantell: Fiona Stanley Hospital will deliver a “federated” model for interoperability across a number of boundaries (internal systems, state-wide systems, remote services, facility management services; provider based services and national e-health services). Sharing information securely across these boundaries is driven by our policies, enterprise and common information architecture. Our standards-based approach to interoperability is utilising best-of-breed technology to connect systems via our health integration hub. These technologies are delivering our catalogue of health services – modular hospital and non-hospital workflows and composite functions that can be re-used across our application landscape. We look for best-of-breed systems that provide and consume this standards based interoperability.
IIR Healthcare: How are you managing the issue of ‘source of truth’ between interfaces?
Di Mantell: Our health information and interoperability architecture is a core capability utilizing our enterprise information model with our common information model (CIM) to deliver health event services. This capability provides management of source-of-truth between the capture and maintenance systems to deliver patient and clinical management. Utilising the interoperability approach and our CIM, we are moving towards single sources of core information such as patient data, provider data and so on, rather than having this information stored on many systems.
IIR Healthcare: Making sure that infrastructure integrates safely and in a way that improves quality in patient care is critical, how have you been refining the integration of systems to achieve this and how have you been garnering clinician engagement?
Di Mantell: Health information governance, ICT and medical device governance structures are part of implementing change and refining systems integration. There are also numerous clinical and business engagement committees and major application business user groups to provide advice and guidance to the governance process. Clinical safety and clinical risk assessments are part of our standard design and testing processes.
IIR Healthcare: You are speaking at the eHealth Interoperability Conference in Sydney in September, what are you hoping to get out of the event and are there any particular presentations or discussions you are particularly looking forward to?
Di Mantell: Generally I will be looking forward to discovering what the current core focus for the delivery is and to sharing of information securely in other hospitals as part of the state’s case studies and attending international presentations in this area.
Related articles
- eHealth standardization and interoperability: New WHA Resolution (imianews.wordpress.com)