MEDITECH partners with customers to establish interoperability solution

BY ROBERT MOLLOY

Data sharing is one of the most complex issues healthcare organizations often face. Too often, important health information is not easily accessible – or even available – when patients visit a clinician outside of their regular provider. Basic details like a patient’s medical history or prescriptions may not appear if the organization is part of a different network or uses another HIS or digital health platform.

The MEDITECH Collaborative, a group of Ontario hospitals and clusters, is addressing these challenges by creating a more connected and interoperable healthcare system with MEDITECH’s Traverse Exchange Canada. This new, first-of-its-kind cloud-based data exchange network will enable the free flow of health information between participating organizations, so providers can always see the complete patient story.

“Traverse is a transformational step forward toward one of our digital health holy grails: the sharing and viewing of discrete patient data across the care continuum without providers having to leave the EMR to view it,” said CARE4 regional CIO Dave Brewin.

“Once fully adopted and integrated with other health information exchanges, we expect the Traverse technology will most definitely help to improve the experiences of our providers and patients.”

Traverse Exchange Canada will provide access to hospital data as well as patient information from a variety of sources, including other (non-MEDITECH hospitals), long-term care, and provincial repositories – with the option to consume this data into their local HIS.

“With improved data sharing, our teams will have a more complete patient history at their fingertips,” Brewin added. “This access to discrete data from other facilities should lead to faster, enhanced decision making.”

As one of the leaders of the MEDITECH Collaborative, Queensway Carleton Hospital vice president, Mental what systems are used at what hospital; they all need to talk to each other and exchange information,” he said.

“Traverse is helping us to simplify what would normally be a complex spider web of interconnections for each connected site, requiring the management of hundreds of connections and partners.”

Traverse Exchange Canada will eliminate the need for providers to use viewers to search for data within each separate organization or provincial repositories. Instead, the information will be brought from multiple sources directly into the patient’s chart, significantly reducing the amount of time providers will spend looking for this data.

Health, Diagnostic Services, chief information officer, and chief privacy officer Tim Pemberton has been instrumental to this initiative.

“We wanted to re-imagine how systems interoperate. It should not matter

Pemberton anticipates that Traverse Exchange Canada will also impact the Best Possible Medication History process, which requires extensive outreach to retail pharmacies, hospitals,