Introduction
Current Healthcare Landscape
Corporate IT is often dominated by large, established and enterprise business applications that are mature but inflexible. Healthcare is largely the same, compounded by a higher fragmentation of applications in the IT ecosystem due to varying and increasingly specialised clinical domains. Like other industries, healthcare organisations often try to address all their organisations needs with one application that provides many modules, that works as a clinical Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) and is often termed as an Electronic Patient Record system (EPR). This is generally quite costly, either as a capital or subscription expense, and comes at the additional expense of a lack of flexibility. These kinds of systems tend to dictate workflow and functionality to the user, without the ability to adapt to an organisations’ specific needs. Another common approach is ‘best-of-breed’, where groups or individuals within an organisation select the most appropriate solution for a specific need, at a specific time. The result is a highly fragmented environment coupled with an inability to consolidate data for secondary uses e.g. management dashboards with real-time information. Additionally, the solutions are slow to change to support changing processes or trialling new models of care. Open Source Innovation Platform (OSIP)
Whichever approach is prevalent in an organisation, deploying a flexible data platform alongside the existing infrastructure unlocks data silos and facilitates interoperability and innovation. Data management middleware: The OSIP is a service-oriented environment with the ability to connect to any other system. It is sent and can also extract data from silos and makes it available in a secure and auditable manner to the rest of the IT ecosystem. The organisation is therefore able to continue to benefit from legacy systems as long as it is needed and at the same time share crucial data with other parties safely. Data persistence: The persistence layer also makes sure that the organisation is not constrained when transporting data from one system to another. It can also be used to combine data from different sources and create new business rules. Standards: Using common IT and healthcare standards, access to clinical and business data is fully secure manner and available from anywhere using web-API’s. This provides the ability to connect additional apps and systems to your environment without compromising security. Flexibility: Healthcare organisations need a flexible innovation platform on which to nurture and test ideas and functionality in a safe and secure environment, using real data. The platforms modular nature means an organisation can deploy the elements that matter most, when it matters most. Cost Effective: When designing the OSIP ensure that it was accessible to all was a key requirement. A large part of this is cost, and so all components that have been selected are open-source and available to download freely. This includes the code and scripts that are written by Fluance which provide the ‘wrapper’ around the 3rd party components.
This whitepaper details the scope and functionality that the OSIP provides, and the typical scenarios that the platform provides value to. —-
Table of Contents
A. Introduction
B. Innovation and Open Technology
D. Outside the current scope of OSIP