Potential Customer - AHS - Prof. Ian McKillop

We had a team meeting with Prof. Ian McKillop today. He's attached to Health Studies and has his training in IS. He's cross-listed with CS and HS, so he is the bridge between the two departments that we are hoping will make this project go forward. He is a source of domain knowledge and a contact for the kind of systems that health care sites currently use. He is also an excellent source of field contacts for us. He knows people that we should talk to to do requirements discovery, and potential sites to run an experiment.

In Hospital Scenario

Main IS functions:

• Data capture (nurse's data has more structure)
• Movement of data (query / order)

Systems Overview:

• Island systems
  • low integration
  • patient info system (central registry)
  • image archiving (i.e. agfa)
  • pharmacy
    • inventory tracking
    • dispensary
    • order entry
  • lab systems
    • ordering
    • tracking
  • surgical scheduling (workflow)
  • nurse workload choices
  • meal choices
• health systems use HL7 for data transfer... which is based on EDI which predates XML

I.T. People - two types

• buy best of breed individually
  • disparate systems
  • don't integrate well
• purchase all from a single vendor
  • a single vendor to blame
  • integration
    • medical record screen (electronic health record)

Doctors were trained on clipboard/paper systems

• some moving to dicta-phone
• don't like constraints / tethers (bedside terminals suck)

Need to provide interface to existing system

• large scale backend (proprietary)
  • security / user management (1200-1300 employees)

University Health Network (UHN)

• has PDA experiment in place (CRE)
• potential experiments for tetherless
  • pharmacy order
  • medical / nursing order
• proprietary achitecture

Mobile Worker (Homecare) Scenario

Mobile Nurses (Comunity Care Access Centre)

• medical record
• manually chart what they do (data entry)
• enter at end of day