Importance of EMR Integration

I worked in a large multi-disciplinary medical center in mid-west.  That medical center is best known for its EMR records.  In fact, I think they were the one who started the indexing all patient records back in the early 1990s.  I think you probably which medical center that I described about. :).  When I was there, I was responsible the ambulatory system that supports 2000+ physicians and 10,000+ allied health staffs.  Although they have a enterprise EMR system in place, each specialty or groups in the organization do need some special applications or systems to support their unique practices.  Thus, records generated by these silos systems may not be integrated or easily accessible to others.  It's my role to find a way how to integrate all these records together and present such a way that is efficient and useful for physicians to do their jobs.  In this job, I learned that physicians like to use NOC (Number of Clicks) to evaluate the performance or efficiency of a system.  So, remember to try to reduce the number of clicks in your apps!!!.

We have built an app that mainly pull the records from these systems and mesh them into many different widgets that physicians can use.  Think about the app is like iGoogle in which physicians can turn on/off their interested widgets to display the information that they want.  Physicians can position the widgets the way that they want to fit their workflows.  We have many good feedbacks from the users groups which express how the app help them to make faster and better decisions with all the information integrate in one app without going back/forth.