Bridgecare® – System and Equipment Interoperability Solution in Hospital Environments
Digitization is increasingly present in companies' daily operations, improving processes and employee productivity. The healthcare sector is no exception, and the benefits also directly impact user well-being, promoting the decentralization of exams and consultations through telemedicine.
However, in hospital environments there is a growing demand for managing information from different data sources, a factor that makes unified communication difficult, increases the load on systems and generates incompatibility between information.
In an attempt to optimize the flow of internal processes, all data management goes through the HIS (Hospital Information System) system and other systems are integrated into it, the main ones being:
PACS: Picture Archiving and Sharing System – a system used to store virtually all files related to diagnostic imaging exams. This allows any member of the clinic or hospital's internal staff to search this information and gather more data on specific exams at any time in an organized manner.
RIS: Radiology Information System – This is the software that acts as the “brain” of an imaging center, helping the clinic or hospital team maintain control over all exams performed on all patients, in an organized and standardized manner.
LIS: Laboratory Information System – is a computerized system that records, manages and stores data and information for clinical analysis laboratories.
Integrating these systems within the HIS is often complex, and for IT teams, the task has become even more challenging with the inclusion of IoT sensors for clinical engineering telemetry and new medical equipment connected to the systems. And when we consider different vendors of these solutions with customized systems (HIS, LIS, or PACS), the integration and management of information becomes a veritable web.
Telemedicine has also been integrated into the HIS system. This new form of medical care has grown exponentially worldwide. In Brazil, one of the largest diagnostic medicine networks reported a 226% increase in teleconsultations in the first two months of 2022.
The effect of this increase is directly related to the health crisis; however, industry experts believe that the consultation model will continue to rise even after the pandemic.
Research conducted by Mordor Intelligence indicates that the telemedicine market is expected to grow from its current US$38 billion to US$168 billion by 2026. In Brazil alone, the telemedicine market closed 2022 with revenues of US$2.82 billion , according to Statista, a company specializing in analyzing market and consumer information.
Data interoperability in the hospital environment
The digitalization of medicine also means bringing more technology into hospitals, requiring administrative managers and hospital IT to pay greater attention to the use of systems and data collection.
As described previously, data management in a hospital environment is a significant challenge in itself. The variety of existing systems and the resulting need for interoperability make point-to-point connectivity across care and organizational environments impossible.
The problem becomes worse when the healthcare organization has several decentralized service points and bases, resulting in multiple records and lost information.
To help healthcare organizations overcome this challenge, Above-Net developed the Bridgecare® . A platform capable of integrating information from multiple systems into a single central repository and sharing it in various formats and protocols, bridging the gap between multiple technologies.
Bridgecare® natively integrates with hospital systems (HIS, LIS, and PACS), seamlessly connecting information to the central repository. The platform monitors the database for duplicate records, homonyms, and information conflicts in a customized manner.
This also provides greater security and allows the patient's life to be monitored within the healthcare system, regardless of the unit or legacy system in which they were treated.
The solution uses modern transmission protocols such as HL7 (Health Level 7) or even text file format for legacy systems. Using proprietary technology, equipment locations are automatically located. Bridgecare® acts as a central repository for all information. Furthermore, the platform integrates equipment, measurements, and sensors, providing visibility and integrated management for clinical engineering, maintenance, and hospital management.
Process optimization
The Bridgecare platform offers support to optimize IT processes by improving the quality of the organization's information, such as:
Unified Login Service: With encryption for employees who use all of the institution's systems where only one username and password is used regardless of the access system;
Configurable intelligent sanitization: There are more than 40 intelligent and configurable rules that allow the identification of historical or real-time duplicate records of connections and interface to resolve pending records.
Terminology Service: Offers flexibility for interconnecting terms and standards between any system with versioning records that allow for connector-independent evolution.
Command Center: IoT for infrastructure, clinical engineering, and equipment – monitors cold rooms, medical gas plants, medical IT, power, water, and air conditioning plants, and equipment using Above-Net , with predictive analysis of the functioning of the vital infrastructure of hospitals and care centers.
The Bridgecare platform is a successful platform used by one of the world's largest cities. Thousands of service points integrate data and manage information for more than 25 million patients, with over 200 million appointments, securely and reliably through the use of communication protocols and integration methods used in the industry's most demanding applications.
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