Interoperability Enhancement for an Ontario-based Medical Imaging Solutions Development Company
Our client, a healthcare technology development company headquartered in Ontario, develops unified diagnostic & enterprise image viewing solutions for care providers across North America. The client's flagship solution enables healthcare professionals access radiology images through mobile devices. The convenience of the solution's 'on-the-go access' to X-ray, CT, MRI, color ultrasound, and X-Ray angiography helped the client earn a sizable client base across Africa and Europe as well. The client sought to enhance the multifaceted patient image viewing application with unified access to distributed information across referring hospitals.
Client Challenge
Outfitting the patient image viewing application to access distributed patient information and documents would facilitate patient matching and seamless exchange of radiology reports. Most radiology practices use applications that store medical images in PACS, EMR, and VNA formats, limiting access to previous radiology reports, medical information, and radiology images. Overcoming this limitation was the primary challenge.
The diverse nature of the client's product suite made it capable of connecting with network hospitals to facilitate the sharing of patient records, scan reports, and medical images. But, the lack of a unified document sharing mechanism vastly hampered its capabilities.
Access to prior patient records across different EHR systems and patient portals called for an 'API'-based solution. This independent solution would help consumers and sources to access the information required through interfaces.
Our Solution
Based on a thorough understanding of the client requirements and the current system functionality, our healthcare application development squad swung into action with a plan. Here are the enhancements we developed:
API Development: The team’s tool of choice for the interoperability enhancement was the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) standard, an interoperability profile that facilitates the registration and distribution of patient electronic health records across health enterprises. XDS could extricate prior patient records from discreet PACS systems and share radiology images and reports across various EHR suites and patient portals as desired. XDS enhanced the client’s application to share patient records across network hospitals.
Development of Patient Identification Mechanisms: Nalashaa developed API calls to support patient identification and maintain a trail of access to document repositories. It was crucial to establish the patient identification mechanism since the final product would access the data from disparate EHR systems.
QA and Integration Testing: The client application was enhanced with customized algorithms for patient matching and access to radiology reports from PACS repositories. All the data validation mechanisms were tested for consistency in performance to overcome glitches in the live environment.
Benefits
- Seamless Access to distributed document sources
- Patient identification and audit logging capabilities
- Support for Multi-Disciplinary imaging needs
How We Made a Difference
Streamlined diagnostic workflows across departments
Longitudinal & Searchable Record of Patient Images
Secured access with a trail of access log for traceability
Technology Stack
- Java(JDK7)
- IHE
- XDS.b Profile
- Sql Server
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