UPMC Paves Road to Better Quality Health Care
25 February 2008
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a leading integrated health care enterprise, and dbMotion, a premier provider of health care information integration software that facilitates interoperability and Health Information Exchange (HIE), today announced the completion of the first phase of their extensive interoperability initiative.
As a result, an initial group of caregivers at UPMC now have easy access to the comprehensive patient information needed to advance the quality of care. The announcement was made at the 2008 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Fla.
"This is a remarkable start to one of the largest projects ever for creating true interoperability in health care," said G. Daniel Martich, MD, chief medical information officer at UPMC. "Our goal is to dramatically improve patient care and safety by allowing data to be easily retrieved, shared and understood across our 20 hospitals, 400 outpatient sites and doctors' offices and other care facilities."
UPMC's interoperability platform is centered on the dbMotion Solution, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based technology. It creates an integrated patient record composed of a patient's medical data maintained at facilities that otherwise have no common technology through which to share data. This is accomplished without the replacement of existing information systems.
This early phase also includes a first implementation of semantic interoperability, or the integration of data coded in different systems to ensure that the true meaning of the information is presented to clinicians within their normal workflow. At UPMC, the dbMotion Solution aggregates and integrates data from a wide variety of clinical systems including: Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Siemens, Misys, Quest Diagnostics and MEDITECH.
"Given the size and scope of UPMC, this project may provide a national model for addressing one of the critical problems in health care—how to quickly and accurately share data across disparate providers to better and more efficiently care for patients. Working with dbMotion, we believe that we have found the solution,” said Tami Merryman, chief quality officer at UPMC.
"Interoperability is key to our vision of providing the right care to the right patient at the right time, every time," she added.
"This is a great step forward, and we are thrilled to be able to assist UPMC in executing its vision of clinical excellence," said Yuval Ofek, dbMotion’s CEO. "We look forward to moving ahead together with the same vigor and commitment applied to this first phase of implementation as we build new levels of interoperability within UPMC and its community."
In this first phase, which went live earlier this month, this group of UPMC physicians and other clinicians in two emergency departments, two primary-care ambulatory practices and a medical clinic gained access to a 'single view' of essential medical data.
This includes such clinical categories as medications, allergies, labs and problems. Previously, this information was available in disparate systems across UPMC’s network and was cumbersome to retrieve, compare and analyze.
Formally announced in October 2006, the UPMC-dbMotion initiative also includes a joint development partnership and an investment in dbMotion by UPMC. Next steps in the project include expanding to more users, adding more clinical systems and data sources and progressing to higher levels of semantic interoperability.
