Using integrated clinical environment data for health technology management

Ten years ago the authors presented The Development of an Interoperable Roadmap for Medical Devices} The premise was that interoperability between devices and electronic medical records (EMR) is essential to developing higher quality, safer, and more efficient healthcare delivery. An analysis of a large integrated delivery system's medical devices and EMR was conducted to demonstrate this potential. Successful medical device integration was believed to be important to enable future care-delivery processes and reduce the cost of health technology management (HTM). Since publication of the initial paper, the utilization of medical device data is starting to provide the granularity necessary to improve quality and completeness of EMRs. Adding contextual metadata has the potential to enable improvements in patient safety, quality, and operations and logistics (O&L, including HTM). Utilizing the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE)2 architecture and data model, these data have the potential to provide detailed analysis of adverse events. Therefore, the questions to be asked must include: What are the benefits of interoperable medical device data? How will the data be used? How do we use this data to contribute to the goal of developing a Learning Healthcare System?