Welcome to EMR and EHR

I recently got a note from someone who is working on a rather interesting project. They’re basically creating a standard front end for a hospital’s EMR systems. I think the concept is really interesting and could be really cool to see put in practice. Here’s a note from one of the company founders about what they’re doing.

Contineo (Latin meaning “To bring together”) — is designed to be a back-end agnostic client. Our goal is to wrap all medical information systems into a single client. This means providing access to Nurse Call, Patient Monitoring, Results and even EVS (Environmental) and ordering systems (Such as food ordering).

Additionally, we have integrated messaging features (IM) that allow for staff to communicate with one-another and are working on a range of other elements that really focus on providing the best tool of a clinician to access and interact with medical systems and data.

We do this through our client server architecture where the server is integrated with the varied medical systems through standard APIs. We are working to identify key systems that are standards based and develop modules to connect to them.

Any HL7 or XML based backend can be integrated with.

Currently, we have a proof of concept with a major hospital in Silicon Valley, where we are connecting to a Microsoft Amalga system – and providing the same front-end client that is seen in this Medsphere post.

We are working with clinicians to define workflows that are of value to them – this includes things such as medication administration. The client has an integrated barcode scanner which allows for med/patient verification and the logging of the actual admin of a drug. This encounter scenario can be used in a number of workflows; e.g. Verify order, take action, confirm action completed.

This can be pushed back into the EHR via a standard HL-7 message. In the case of an Amalga implementation – the data could be pushed to both the EMR and Amalga

We are seeking input and feedback and are really looking for more hospitals that would be interested in a POC and potential Pilot.

As you can see they’re looking for hospitals to pilot their product. You can contact Contineo on the Contact page of their website. Otherwise, leave a comment and I’m sure they’ll be watching there as well.

I told them they needed to do the same type of interface for ambulatory EMR. Could be really interesting to see that type of integration with the iPhone.