By Martha Thorne, Allscripts
A pre-surgical patient at an Israeli hospital remembers a complication from anaesthesia during a surgery 14 years ago that left her in the ICU for several days. Neither she nor her family remembers what the complication was, so the patient must undergo additional testing before her surgery can be scheduled.
She’s the lucky one. What if the same situation had occurred with an unconscious patient who required immediate surgery? If providers can’t access relevant patient information in a timely manner, the consequences could be life-threatening.
The desire to aggregate patient information from disparate sources, do it quickly and present it in a way that made sense to caregivers gave rise to the Ofek Network, powered by the Allscripts dbMotion™ Solution, across Clalit Health Services (Tel Aviv, Israel). Featured in a new case study, this health network connects multiple organizations and disparate systems that serve Israel’s 8.3 million residents.
By Martha Thorne, Allscripts
A pre-surgical patient at an Israeli hospital remembers a complication from anaesthesia during a surgery 14 years ago that left her in the ICU for several days. Neither she nor her family remembers what the complication was, so the patient must undergo additional testing before her surgery can be scheduled.
She’s the lucky one. What if the same situation had occurred with an unconscious patient who required immediate surgery? If providers can’t access relevant patient information in a timely manner, the consequences could be life-threatening.
The desire to aggregate patient information from disparate sources, do it quickly and present it in a way that made sense to caregivers gave rise to the Ofek Network, powered by the Allscripts dbMotion™ Solution, across Clalit Health Services (Tel Aviv, Israel). Featured in a new case study, this health network connects multiple organizations and disparate systems that serve Israel’s 8.3 million residents.
The technology compiles a view-only patient record in just seconds, freeing physicians to spend more quality time with patients, saving money on unnecessary tests and procedures, as well as reducing the incidence of complications.
“We’re very proud of being the first and only country to implement such a solution in a national way,” Clalit Health Services Chief Technology Officer Ludovic Abraham said. “It’s a critical information system that our doctors can’t imagine being without.”
Clalit Health Services is the largest of Israel's four health service organizations, which administer health care services and funding for their members. In 1999, Clalit Health Services executives began thinking about how best to share clinical information among widely dispersed hospitals and clinics.
The ultimate goal was to improve the quality of care through a reduction of medical errors and provide proactive care by giving clinicians everything they need to be effective. In 2001, we started with a pilot program at Soroka Hospital (Negev, Israel) to improve the quality of care by increasing the integrity of data. The solution eventually evolved into the dbMotion connectivity platform.
By 2015, the Clalit Health Services integrated data network was used in more than 2,000 hospital departments and clinics, returning about two million patient records a month to more than 15,000 users. The ability to readily exchange data certainly was a high hurdle to clear, but the ability to present relevant data in a format that a caregiver actually can use may have been the project’s greatest accomplishment.
