Traditional (Cerner or EPIC) Hospital Information Systems have limited capabilities for TeleHealth, and even less with regards to wearables that can be used to track acute or chronic conditions in real time.
While such systems are powerful in its scope for in-hospital and out-patient transactions, it does not have the extended capabilities of being able to acquire and share medical data from remote places and in real time using modern wearable technology.
The following example discusses how WiCis can share data with the Cerner Genesis system.
The Genesis system, supports HL7 as part of its HIS offering for hospitals.
The latest version of HL7 is called FHIR. FHIR® – Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (hl7.org/fhir) – is the next generation standards framework created by HL7. FHIR combines the best features of HL7’s v2 , HL7 v3 and CDA product lines while leveraging the latest web standards and applying a tight focus on implementability.
FHIR solutions are built from a set of modular components called “Resources”. These resources can easily be assembled into working systems that solve real world clinical and administrative problems at a fraction of the price of existing alternatives. FHIR is suitable for use in a wide variety of contexts – mobile phone apps, cloud communications, EHR-based data sharing, server communication in large institutional healthcare providers, and much more.
HL7 is an international set of standards for the transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications and health care providers. In fact, HL7 is a group of standards that focuses on:
- Messaging for medical transactions
- Clinical Document Architecture
- Continuity of Care
- Product Labeling
- Clinical Context Objects
- Recent addition of FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) where even apps can share data using the HL7 protocols:
http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/summary.html
Cerner created sandbox environments for third parties to develop and test FHIR solutions with their non—military solutions.
Third party sandboxes also exist for the testing of an FHIR interface for such a project:
The FHIR implementation of HL7 contains a very well-defined area for resources regarding data from medical devices:
Device Metric Resource for FHIR
Using JSON WiCis can send this information to Genesis both in real time or at specified time intervals where data is sent as averages, median or mode for a given variable.
WiCis expertise lies in the realm of real time data from wearables that can be used inexpensively to track multiple chronic diseases. The current WiCis system is able to draw data from many wearables in real time and store all of its information in its cloud-based Cassandra database.
Other non-real-time data can be shared with the Cerner system using for other CareFlow resources.