Published on Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Why healthcare integration is like midwifery

Dominic Green - Global Technical Sales Manager UK, Sláinte Healthcare

Two conversations recently made me ponder this question, which, initially, seems a strange comparison to draw. The first was a talk with one of our contacts from Interfaceware, the Canadian company responsible for writing the integration engine we use, Iguana. While still a relatively new name to the UK healthcare IT sector, Iguana is an established name across North America and in a recent US survey, 17.1% of CIOs and CTOs predicted that Iguana would be the market leader over the next 2-5 years. We agreed that at least in part, this was due to the manner in which Iguana doesn’t try to hide the complexity of systems integration behind complicated UIs, trying to allow everything to be accomplished by “drag ‘n’ drop” – a mechanism which inevitably falls short at some point, leaving the integration engineer building the interface needing to write some code. Interfaceware took the view that rather than forcing someone to switch between environments, they would present the user with the tools required to write code quickly and efficiently. In this manner, the skills inherent in building interfaces aren’t lost to a well-meaning but badly executed attempt to simplify a complex, important task.

I had just come off this conversation when I arrived home to meet with the midwife who will be delivering our new baby this summer. She is from a service who provide private midwifery care through the NHS’s 'Any Willing Provider' scheme. Predominantly, they support home birthing. The discussion I walked into was around breech births and what would happen in this situation. The majority of, if not all, maternity units in the UK have a policy that a breech baby, if it can’t be turned, will be delivered by emergency Caesarean section. Undiagnosed breech babies in home birthing situations, however, must be delivered naturally, with the midwife’s skills, knowledge and experience coming to the fore. This, apparently, is a fairly frequent occurrence and not something the midwives of the One2One service are at all perplexed by, but there are now hospital midwives who have never even seen a breech delivery. Managed properly, a breech delivery leaves the mother able to move around almost immediately, with a recovery plan identical to a standard delivery.

Admittedly, this comparison only holds to a point. There are complex reasons that hospitals have the C-section policy. However, the basic point remains; in both areas, vital skills are being lost which, if nurtured and developed, could lead to a better overall service. Instead, though, in many hospitals worldwide, people are being employed in integration without the necessary skills to take two systems and truly make them interact. Sure, they can use a nice UI to do 80% of the work, but edge cases are just as important when considering the sharing of clinical data. The 20% simply can’t be ignored or treated differently. It is my view that recognition of this is one of the main reasons that Iguana is viewed as the future US market leader.

Dominic Green - Dominic Green - Global Technical Sales Manager UK, Sláinte Healthcare

Dominic has responsibility for overseeing all aspects of interface work between Slaínte products, client sites and 3rd party systems, including scoping, designing and specifying interfaces, designing innovative methods of extracting and utilising data and managing the team which implements and supports the interfaces.

Prior to joining Sláinte Healthcare, Dominic graduated from Liverpool University with a 1st class honours in Computer Science and began a career in the NHS, initially within senior programming roles and later moving into integration, interface development and project management. His primary responsibilities involved acquiring, administering and developing the hospital’s interface engine (Iguana), incubating and piloting innovative projects designed to drive efficiency and patient care, organising multi-disciplinary effort and managing the software development lifecycle for in-house developments.

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/dominic-green/10/222/aa0

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Author: Dominic Green

Categories: Insights

Tags: Integration & Interoperability , HL7

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Why healthcare integration is like midwifery

Dominic Green - Global Technical Sales Manager UK, Sláinte Healthcare

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