EMR Integration, CPOE, HL7 Interface And More: The Electronic Healthcare Conversion

With the information age in full swing, various industries are converting their operations to electronic platforms. As a result of government prompting and funding, the healthcare industry is involved in a major transition, converting medical records from paper to electronic format. This is a huge initiative, involving things like EMR integration and development of an HL7 interface that allows health information to be exchanged within a medical community.
In the past, healthcare providers recorded patient medical information and treatment instructions on paper. To simplify exchange of information between those treating a patient and reduce chances of interpretation errors due to illegible information, there is now a push to capture this information electronically. Increased communication and collaboration designed to improve patient treatment are two major benefits.
This change requires the implementation of practices like computerized physician order entry, or CPOE. Medical providers can now enter patient treatment instructions electronically at point of care or off-site using a physician portal within an electronic medical record, or EMR, system. Health information exchange between the treating physician, hospital, laboratory, and pharmacy is made possible through EMR integration.
Successful integration involves development of an EMR interface designed to capture information and exchange it with the various parties involved in treatment. With various EMR systems in existence, each of which may implement World Science News HL7 standards for health information technology interoperability in a different way, the process becomes very complex. An HL7 interface streamlines the implementation by connecting the legacy systems of the different parties.
Using an HL7 interface, healthcare providers, labs, and hospitals can continue to use their legacy healthcare information systems. The interface connects these systems via a standard messaging protocol Research Questions About Chemotherapy that enables the exchange of information between them. Health information exchange is made possible without the need to make an expensive and time-consuming investment and conversion to a new system.