InfraWare has become a promoter of the Health Story Project because it fits the company’s strategic vision for helping transcription providers add value to the deliverable of transcribed reports. The standardized structure of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) provides a blueprint to help solve the interoperability gap for sharing reports among electronic medical records (EMR) systems. Today, InfraWare provides both proprietary and standards-based interfaces from the TASP to most EMR systems. Both types of interfaces are time-consuming and costly to implement and support. By converging on a single, standardized document format (CDA) that contains a rich data structure in addition to the transcribed narrative, InfraWare expects to provide customers with a low-cost, high-impact vehicle for document delivery that eventually renders those old interfaces obsolete. Transcription providers will be able to provide an EMR-ready document with extended value at a reduced cost.
In today’s climate of government pressure to adopt and extend utilization of EMRs, healthcare facilities are under significant pressure. Many EMR companies have promoted new modalities for creation of medical reports such as point-and-click templates. While these are appropriate in limited scenarios, the vast majority of physicians want to continue dictating and they can best honor their patients by doing so. The concepts of the Health Story Project empower InfraWare and others to connect the technology dots that will allow rapid adoption of EMR systems without requiring significant changes in physician behavior or sacrificing great patient care that stems from a free-form, dictated narrative.
InfraWare is currently developing to the Health Story Project vision and expects to provide solutions for the initial Common Document Types (CDT) in Q4 2009.