Healthcare IT

pclancy

Does anyone work in Healthcare IT? Do anything with systems like PACS, XIMS, Xcellera or any other medical imaging stuff? Would be interesting to hear about what systems Irish Hospitals are using, I've been working in a large hospital for the last 2 years, getting great experience with a big variety of stuff that I'd never seen before in just working for corporate and SME clients.

Static M.e.

There was an article in one of the Sunday papers about Irish Healthcare IT, think it was the Sunday Business Post.

I use to do a lot of work in Irish hospitals but have moved on now.

You should have a look at John Halamka's Blog

http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/

He is a very open about what he (and his Hospital group) uses and what they are pushing for. Well worth a read every day. The guy is a legend

pclancy

Interesting blog. I wonder does my CIO think like that.

Static M.e.

I doubt it ..

From my work, I found the Senior Managers to be near IT illiterate, the last IT Manager hired had NO IT background at all..we had to explain what a server was for..not what he ran, what that box actually did. It gets worse, the other senior admin came from Finance and also had little IT experience, he was moved to ICT because he was terrible at Finance.. we use to use him to install telephones and thats about it, so two juniors and a consultant ran the hospital IT.

I'm probably being too harsh it was near 10 years ago, but our hospitals have such a distinct lack of leadership in any form and IT is still too new for them..

Seriously its now 2010, these "computers" have been around for a while, why do we still not have an Enterprise Level computer system's in all our hospitals. Why isn't every hospital and Care systems linked together. If I visit a hospital in Dundalk while on holidays why doesn't my doctor in Dublin or Cork see that on my charts? Why cant my information follow me around? Why does a doctor need to ask me about my allergies, why cant he just read it from a screen?

We are a small island, with a limited number of hospitals and health care units, it isn't a big deal to link them with technology. The problem is always inside with the organization with its structure\boundaries and a COMPLETE lack of leadership coming from the HSE telling them how to work together.

What Ireland needs is a Central CIO with a decent set of balls (Doesn't have to be a guy here..) who will kick ass and take names. Remove the ICT functions from hospitals altogether, remove funding and provide the hospitals with one standard Medicare system. Its not brain science..

//Rant off

pclancy

Haha sounds familiar.

New Zealand is going through much of the same thing except we still have multiple district health boards all using unique infrastructure and often bespoke applications and suffer from poor ability to share data. An Xray taken at a hospital only 30Kms away can't be viewed without conversion or someone carrying it on a disk. Similar population just much bigger landmass but its funny how the issues are the same.

SouperComputer

I work for a healthcare company in the US. We use Amicas (Formerly Emageon) for PACS and Excellian (Epic heavily bastardized) as an EMR, OnBase for document management. Our full list of apps is probably 400 or so, but these three cover most of it.

pclancy

Excellian looks interesting, I guess every healthcare provider around the globe suffers from the same problems with patient data privacy and having one record for each patient instead of tons of data spread across lots of different systems.

pclancy

Been thinking lately about open source applications for HP Mini laptops.

• PACS
• Patient Info through EHR
• Ultrasound
• Traige
• Discharge

The resolutions these mini laptops are able of now and processor speeds plus the use of Ubuntu etc makes me wonder about are there any people customising flavours of Ubuntu to work in hospital environments?

Are hospitals using any open source stuff at all come to think of it? I know we don't.

SouperComputer

pclancy wrote: »

Been thinking lately about open source applications for HP Mini laptops.

• PACS
• Patient Info through EHR
• Ultrasound
• Traige
• Discharge

The resolutions these mini laptops are able of now and processor speeds plus the use of Ubuntu etc makes me wonder about are there any people customising flavours of Ubuntu to work in hospital environments?

Are hospitals using any open source stuff at all come to think of it? I know we don't.

Over here it appears that MS get into bed with the orgs and this makes moving to open source less worthwhile where OS is concerned. I don't know of any organizations using opensource solutions for an EMR, im sure its out there, but im not aware of any on a large scale. Epic, Cerner and GE prettymuch have it tied up. MS are trying to knock on the door but they still have a long way to go.. Service-now might be a contender for incident\change management but I haven't seen anything much on EMR side thats open source. Likely because of the heavy clinical aspect to it. As times goes on it will probably get more difficult for open source to penetrate as EMR will develop into to point-of-care, decision making software, rather than a mere record.

I'm not sure what it's like in Ireland, but the biggest obstacles for Excellian have been legislative. We now have an affiliate strategy with other healthcare providers who can use Excellian via Citrix. However, by default, the chart is not shared with all of Excellian, only that facility. A patient can have one chart Allina, and multiple affiliates with all in the same system, but not linked in any way. Each healthcare company cannot see the other charts for the patient without explicit permission from the patient. More paperwork, and more delays. We are getting there though...

pclancy

Has anyone done much with Video Conferencing? Looking at a few different Polycom options for inter-hospital sharing of HD video and documents. Some amazingly expensive kit out there! We've got a mix of ISDN and IP based units currently and most other hospitals seem to the same, are many people in Ireland still using ISDN for video conferencing?

Static M.e.

Cisco are doing some neat stuff at the moment with video conferencing...might be worth checking out.

We use the low cost version with IP Cameras\Skype\Webex and lots of broadband..unfortunetly most of the time Ive seen Video Conferencing put in, it isn't used at all after 3 or 4 months despite the cost of installing it so we went for a low cost option to test the water.

BostonB

Not quite the same thing but, we use video conferencing on some software development teams that aren't in the same location but working on the same project. But its a desk top app (Cisco I think) they treat it like a messenger type chat client, but with video and some tools to allow them see each others desktop etc. Works well.