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What is different? When a patient's health record is available on line, the patient is no longer locked into a particular provider. Armed with choice through their now digitally accessible health records, many patients will become more sophisticated consumers of healthcare services. Many will evolve from passive to active participants regarding their own care. Consumers will become more involved in their treatment regimes and options.
The model for healthcare delivery will look more like the modern, dynamic "global supply chain" employed by manufacturing companies versus the vertically stove-piped model of today's hospital systems.
Insurance companies will find ways (perhaps via premium rebates) to encourage the use of innovative providers who have demonstrated an ability to deliver quality services at lower costs.
The end game is a health care market that is more market oriented. Smaller providers who are agile and without large overhead will be able to compete more effectively by creating a value chain of like-minded partners who can combine "virtually". They will be competing by cooperating, and doing so without forgoing their independence.
During 2009 OCI engineers have been participating the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) program. The focus of OCI's activities was participation in CONNECT, the part of the architecture that facilitates health information exchange. OCI is bringing to bear its decades of experience in the development and deployment of high performance distributed, platform neutral, open source solutions. CONNECT software is already running in the OCI Development Center. OCI is currently contributing code to the open source product. OCI was the first company outside of the original team to be given "committer" status.
OCI is uniquely positioned to offer support services to healthcare professionals who intend to be "first movers" in 3rd generation healthcare systems. OCI's plans for service offerings including:
- Architecture Design & Review
- Integration Planning & Implementation (connecting health care providers to HIE framework)
- Training and Mentoring
- Outreach to Communities & Providers who need to adopt EHR
Sample Projects
Pharmacy Benefit Management framework for a pharmacy insurance services company: This framework was designed to enable web access by patients and pharmacists, who could re-order prescriptions, check insurance plan coverage, and eventually purchase other medical products. The framework -- using CORBA, C++, and Java -- connected to many diverse systems that had been acquired during the company's expansion.
Drug Design: OCI provided architecture and implementation support for a commercial drug design product for pharmaceutical companies. The application assists chemists who deal with vast quantities of information and chemical combinations involved in molecular modeling.
Enterprise Application Integration: For a leading pharmaceutical benefits management firm, provided high level architecture, mentoring, and implementation support using J2EE and CORBA technologies to integrate disparate procedural and client-server systems.
Intranet Patient Information System: A network of hospitals and physicians required access to multiple legacy systems. OCI designed and implemented a common web-based user interface solution to provide easy access to information.
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