iPhone and iTouch Front End for Hospital EMR Systems

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.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Sounds very interesting. I am sure the company is considering a lot of things in terms of security other than how messages are handled. iPhone, iPod touch connect over wifi that means it could be a secured or an unsecured network. People often loose their device and will forget about it so there must be lot of authentications to be done. Finally, as iphone releases a new version there is a jailbreak released, that means iphone has serious problems with hackers. 🙂

    but the idea is good and will look forward to see how they do it. If ever they give a trial I can have the app on my ipod touch to comment on. 🙂

  • Poorna,
    I’m not sure a jail broken iPhone will have any more security issues than a regular one. However, any cell phone device definitely has to plan for a number of interesting and unique security issues.

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