Sam and his team work for a Texas based leading innovator that caters to fertility clinics. These clinics extensively use clients’ Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions to manage and exchange clinical and administrative information.
The Communication GAP
Sam and his team had been receiving daily requests from their clients, asking for a solution that could connect their ultrasound machines and the EMR
Erstwhile, there was no way for the EMR solutions to communicate with the ultrasound machines. Ultrasound reports were shared with the clinicians manually. This created a lot of complexities. Manual sharing resulted in huge losses of data and created human errors. These caused long delays in providing proper care, which sometimes had undesirable consequences for the patients.
The Required Communication Channel
Sam wanted a technology partner who would understand his client’s pain points and provide a solution for seamless data transfer. He came across Nalashaa on LinkedIn. After some research, he found that Nalashaa had almost 10+ years of domain knowledge and expertise in providing healthcare IT services. Consequently, the experts from Nalashaa were called in to implement a solution that would allow the seamless exchange of ultrasound images and data between the systems.
During the brief discovery phase, these experts learned that Sam’s clients preferred a customized solution that met their existing infrastructure needs, over a COTS solution. The EMR solution of SAM’s client was a server-based application. Sam and the team wanted the DICOM listener (a standard used for storing and transmitting medical data) and parser to be developed as a dot net service so that it can be hosted in each clinic.
They also wanted worklists to be pushed from their EHR to the ultrasound machines.
Identifying the Communication Barrier
The team at Nalashaa understood that they needed healthcare interoperability solutions to resolve the problem of Sam’s client. But the major challenge of building a fool-proof solution was the lack of availability/access to ultrasound machines that would allow the team of experts to test and confirm communications. So, as a part of the solution design, the team created a simulator that would read any type of byte stream coming from the port and IP to which the ultrasound machines were connected. The objective was to trigger a verification call to the POC application’s port when the ultrasound machine is used.
The team confirmed this through a test run that they could receive messages in the byte stream format. Building on top of the POC, the solution was developed that converted the stream into the required data format and images.
Outcomes of the Communication Channel
Soon Sam and his team started implementing this listener service in their client’s systems. The benefits that the clients experienced were:
- Quick rendering in the visualizer by converting scanned images into JPEG. Scanned images could now be directly transferred from their ultrasound machines to the visualizer without the need for a hardcopy.
- The configurable design of the system allowed the end-users and client administrators to add/edit profiles, test and create custom templates.
- It enabled the exchange of updated patient worklist from the EMR to the ultrasound machines and test results from the ultrasound machines back into the EMR.
- The client’s systems were now interoperable with every ultrasound machine within the building.
- All of this toil resulted in swift care delivery, better health outcomes and ultimately improved patient satisfaction.
Joining the Communication Wires
Below is a list of technologies Nalashaa made use of
