Epic BioMedical Device Integration Implementation

Sentara Healthcare added medical device integration to the Epic system in March, 2008. Biomedical device integration offers a way to simplify workflow and enhances the value of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The adoption of medical device interoperability and systems will enable the development of innovative approaches to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, and provider efficiency for patient care.

Bio-Medical Device Integration (BMDI) integrates medical devices with clinical info systems to automatically collect device information such as vital signs, ventilator, measurement settings, alarms/alerts, and exports the data into an EMR system. This medical device interoperability indicates that the data from one medical device can impact the behavior of yet another device. This interaction is mediated by software running on general purpose computing platforms. Employing BMDI can improve nurses’ workflow and documentation time, eliminates transcription errors, and maximizes EMR investment. It will boost patient care and safety, and enable clinicians and nurses to invest more time with the patients’ instead of documenting data.

Over the past couple of years, Sentra Healthcare System BMDI Project deployed over 250 FDA approved medical grade terminal servers. They  have run eight Capsule servers, upgraded a lot more than 150 ventilators and configured thirty-seven Phillips DBS/CS. There are several tools that assist in managing hardware and software support, such as professional system monitoring and HP server manager integration. The device checks servers for network connectivity and automatically pages a clinical engineering if anything needs to be fixed. The systems also have reporting maintenance plans, policies and procedures, and back up and recovery tactics.

Sentra Healthcare Systems hopes to expand BMDI systems to hospitals across the country. Improving the high quality of medical devices will improve the rate of adoption of new clinical technologies and improve patient care. Sentra looks forward to introducing extra IT tools, devices, and vendors to generate integrated opportunities to increase workflow.