Moving health care into the 21st century means incorporating technology into all of the daily processes that make the system go ‘round, and under the umbrella term of “eHealth” it’s just what Canada intends to do in the coming years. But the goal is a lofty one, and challenges range from the disconnect between how data is stored and presented and how to bridge the divide between the entities that will come together to enable eHealth.
One Toronto-based software solutions company called
Xenos is looking to tackle the print-stream side of the eHealth equation by automating health-care records and streamlining the transfer of data between health-care workers. Xenos’ implementation links physicians to the information they need in real-time and in a format that’s compatible with various applications.
“It cuts down on a lot of manual processing,” said Craig Smith, vice-president of sales and global marketing at Xenos. “The less that anybody has to manually input information into their applications, it’s going to be far more accurate and a lot faster.”
About two years ago, Xenos provided a health-care records solution to Grey Bruce Health Services, a group of five hospitals in Grey and Bruce counties, that integrated the organization’s patient-care system, boosted the central system’s security, enabled data routing and made its messaging format compliant with HL7, an electronic health information standard. Under the new system, Smith estimated that doctors are saving “two hours a day when they don’t have to run back to the hospital to get the records.”
As for how cutting down the health paper trail and making the data more compatible with the various applications used in the health-care industry will make a dent in eHealth efforts happening elsewhere, Craig sees triumph in the fact that “there is a solution.”
