When a patient arrives in the intensive care unit, ideally clinicians would be able to see the most up-to-date record of her health and care. But because electronic medical records systems made by different vendors don’t communicate with each other, that can’t always happen.
Zoeticx is hoping to change that by introducing a platform that combines cloud and mobile architecture to solve some of hospitals’ EMR interoperability challenges.
Called Healthcare Oriented Architecture, the company’s middleware software consolidates patient information from different EMR systems into one interface. It acts like a set of translators that turns EMR data from different sources into one universal format, and displays it in a single platform, said CEO Thanh Tran.
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As of now, the company has built “gateways” that can push and pull data to and from Cerner, Epic and some Allscripts EMRs. Zoeticx’s software also allows for physicians to view patients’ real-time biometric data in the same dashboard, set thresholds for alerts to be sent to specific providers and send secure messages to others on the care team.
The goal is to eventually act as the translator for third-party applications that other developers would build on top of the platform, freeing them from having to build specific applications for each different EMR system, Tran said. “We’re building the platform and two applications to showcase how apps can be built on top of our platform,” he said. “Our vision is that eventually we turn the platform into something like a data switch.”
Some organizations are creating health information exchanges to facilitate the sharing of EMRs. “HIEs can be OK for analytics purposes, but if I’m a doctor in the ICU and I’m going to look at records, I may be accessing stale data,” Tran said.
Instead of building a central hub to store data from different systems, Zoeticx uses a cloud-based server that pulls and pushes information to and from the EMR only when requested. Tran said it doesn’t require infrastructure changes and can be deployed within a day or two.
The San Jose, Calif., company is currently collecting data from a pilot of HOA at a teaching medical center that’s focused on cancer.
