UPMC to commercialize tablet app for visual EHR access
It’s no secret that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has been leading the charge to improve physician’s workflow across various clinical applications.
UPMC, in fact, joined forces with Caradigm, Intel and Microsoft last year to build a software platform dubbed Convergence that runs on Windows 8.1 and gives physicians what UPMC describes as “a consolidated view of key patient health data,” to deliver information akin to a longitudinal record.
Since then, UPMC re-christened Convergence as Fluence, and at HIMSS15 it will launch the product into the national marketplace.
Fluence is an overlay layer that sits on top of data silos created through the years, including EHRs and other clinical information systems, according to Rasu Shrestha, MD, chief innovation officer and also president of UPMC’s 200-member Technology Development Center.
"What it does is brings that patient story to life," Shrestha explained. "It allows intelligent evaluation and a much more user-friendly workflow layer. It's aided by analytics; it's aided by intelligent decision support and clinical care pathways. So, we've actually created that to address some of the limitations of where we are today as an industry on data interoperability."
Fluence, which runs on a variety of Windows devices including Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, desktops and smartphones, also includes a developer framework on top of which third-parties can build apps to leverage Fluence’s data interoperability functions.
"It's one thing to have these silos, but it's another to then break down these silos by aggregating data across the board,” Shrestha said. “How do you go from data to information, and from information to meaning? Where we are right now as an industry, we're at the data level. We're locked. The data is locked in multiple silos."
Shrestha and his colleague Ranga Chandra Gudivada, manager for enterprise vocabulary services at UPMC, will present Beyond the Hype: Achieving True Semantic Interoperability on April 16th from noon to 1 p.m. in Room W196C.
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