This article was originally published on the HTN website.
As part of the HTN #HealthTechToShoutAbout feature series, we spoke to Rhapsody to hear more about their work in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As healthcare organisations throughout the world work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and care for an overwhelming number of infected patients, the need for sharing patient data between systems, departments, organisations, and regions has never been greater.
Rhapsody said to HTN “Globally, we are going through a healthcare crisis, and Rhapsody is part of the solution to help the interoperability of the healthcare delivery system.
“Their interoperability platform, Rhapsody, enables seamless data exchange among disparate organisations within healthcare, including health systems, telehealth platforms, Electronic Health Records and health IT vendors.
The platforms support all health data formats and standards — including FHIR — allowing healthcare organisations to integrate quickly, easily, and securely either as an on-premise or cloud-hosted solution. Once in place, the platform ticks away in the background ensuring guaranteed message delivery so that healthcare staff can focus on patient care.
The company said “Our products enable a critical layer of interoperability to health IT infrastructure, allowing healthcare organisations to share, exchange, and report clinical data. For instance, which patients have been tested? How are patients’ outcomes being monitored and tracked? Which providers have access to that data to ensure continuity of patient care? How is that data being reported to public health agencies?
“Using data sharing to track information about symptoms, recovery times, and efficacy of treatments from disparate locations can help to identify further insights into the disease as health experts across the globe look to better understand the virus, care for patients who are exposed to it, and develop a vaccine for COVID-19.”
Here’s how the platform can help during the COVID-19 health crisis:
- Inspect every message or document flowing through the integration engine to identify those with COVID-19 codes, as well as site-specific codes where required. (Rhapsody has added similar flags for other results, such as MRSA and C.DIFF, which have won awards for our customers for innovation.)
- Supports multiple message formats, including Hl7v2, CDA, FHIR, CSV, JSON, XML
- Inspects all coded elements in your document or message
- Log and/or report each (matching) document or message
- A report can include all matches found in the document or message, identifying the matching codes and context
- Add metadata for patient ID and document ID
- Optionally send the results to a data store for extended reporting
- Easily scale up and cope with increased volumes of testing
“While the most important mission right now is saving lives, the COVID-19 pandemic will eventually force healthcare organisations to consider how well their systems enable data exchange — not only because it is the right thing to do for patients, but because we must be better prepared for the next public health crisis. As business models evolve, organisations that are best at enabling data portability and scalability — in a way that is efficient, accurate, secure, and shareable with any destination system — we can better address public health crises such as the coronavirus in new ways.
“During a time when so much is uncertain, it takes data that is easily shareable and actionable to help us make the right decisions and create a health system that is better equipped to care for patients in times of calm and in times of crisis.”
