The Health Story Project: Building a case for point solutions

In this blog, we have spoken often of achieving physician adoption when implementing EMR technologies and the importance of finding solutions that capture patient data in a way that is natural to physicians, without being slower or more cumbersome than their typical hand-written, dictated or transcribed methods.

However, there is another major concern that often arises from hospital administrators when they are evaluating potential EMR technologies: even if a system can adequately collect and capture patient data, is that data in a format that allows it to be sufficiently analyzed and reported? Does this vendor’s platform integrate with the facility’s core EMR in a way that will help achieve a more complete and useful medical record?

This issue of patient data “harmonization” between software platforms is becoming more prevalent as more vendors appear on the market every day offering different capabilities and specialties. Health care providers are tasked with meeting the EMR implementation requirements created by the stimulus package while seeking out the solutions that best meet their physicians’ and patients’ needs.

This concept of being able to transfer and share patient data between various software platforms is so vital to the health care and EMR industries that a number of healthcare providers, vendors and associations have come together to create The Health Story Project (www.healthstory.com). The goal of The Health Story Project is to produce data standards for the flow of information between common types of healthcare documents and EMR platforms in a structured way so that hospitals can derive meaning from that data.

The most immediate benefit of The Health Story Project to health care providers is that they will feel better about implementing point solutions that are particularly attractive to specific specialties and won’t have to rely on a single vendor for everything. For example, if one vendor offers the best cardiology system but another offers the best solution for the Emergency Department’s operations, both platforms – and any number of others – will operate amicably within the same facility and all of the information that is captured in those systems can be exchanged into a single, core EMR in a highly structured, actionable way.

As a vendor in the EMR industry, we have long recognized that even as Salar offers the strongest clinical documentation system on the market, our products won’t have as much value to our clients if it doesn’t integrate seamlessly with Cerner, EPIC, McKesson, MEDITECH or any other of the major EMR solutions in which they’ve already invested. In addition to creating clinical documentation tools that physicians prefer, our mission has always been to also create tools that CIOs prefer because they won’t have to replace any of their existing EMR infrastructure and are in fact making its capabilities even stronger.

While we are not currently funding The Health Story Project, we do fully support its mission and believe in its potential to advance EMR technology and benefit health care providers, vendors and ultimately patients nationwide.