QUEBEC CITY, e-Health Conference, June 1, 2009 – In addressing the evolution of healthcare delivery, one of the principal challenges is the seamless exchange of medical data across multiple health organizations. Healthcare enterprises and regional authorities are growing quickly and looking to improve their productivity and the quality of patient care. They also face tremendous challenges in connecting their IT and legacy clinical systems in order to share disparate medical data across health organizations

"Healthcare information will be the cornerstone to our moving forward with longitudinal health records, and this solution provides a solid platform to move the information in a safe and highly secure manner," said Mark Farrow, chief information officer and assistant vice president, Information and Communication Technologies, Hamilton Health Sciences Centre.

To help address current challenges, Cisco and Tiani Spirit integrated Cisco's Application Extension Platform (AXP) and Cisco's Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) with Tiani Spirit's IHE platform to enable a more simplified and more secure exchange of medical information across a range of healthcare disciplines.  Karos Health and Cisco are jointly introducing the Cisco® Medical Data Exchange Solution (MDES) into the North American market to provide healthcare professionals from multiple institutions with access to patient data from previously disconnected information systems using incompatible formats and disparate medical terminology.

The Cisco MDES provides the collaborative tools necessary to improve cross-facility communication and patient care. MDES utilizes the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE®) technical frameworks to establish a standards-based approach to interoperability and data exchange. MDES addresses two key challenges: formulating a common patient reference, and being able to share and access patient records across disparate systems. In addition, the solution conforms to the IHE security framework to support authorized access and to deny unauthorized access to records.  The MDES's interoperability capabilities also reduce costs by eliminating costly manual transport and proprietary data exchanges and interfaces.

As a member of Cisco's AXP Developer Partner and Cisco Technology Developer Programs, Karos Health works with Cisco to customize and deploy the MDES solution. With the MDES platform, the complexity of medical data integration is greatly simplified, providing a high level of security and simplifying deployment for healthcare entities with multiple hospitals, distributed clinics and labs, and remote practices.

"With the Cisco MDES, clinical information exchanges can be gradually deployed. For example, the process can start with two hospitals, then encompass their referral base and ancillary services, then expand to a whole regional health authority and, potentially, to a national grid of connected health providers and patients," said Rick Stroobosscher, president of Karos Health. "Clinical information exchange grids are the stepping stone to electronic health records (EHRs), providing their users with all information generated along multi-provider patient care pathways."

"The Cisco network architecture makes MDES a hardened resilient platform, which can be deployed as a set of appliances and centrally configured and monitored," said Brantz Myers, director, Healthcare Business Development for Cisco Canada. "With MDES, the network becomes the healthcare platform for collaborating, decreasing costs and risks, and simplifying IT management."

Cisco MDES will be presented at the e-Health conference in Quebec City in the Cisco booths (227 and 328). MDES will also be at the core of the e-Health Interoperability Showcase, a multivendor demonstration where disparate clinical systems will exchange health information according to a set of typical clinical scenarios while adhering to industry standards.

Tags / Keywords:

Cisco, Karos Health, Tiani Spirit, Medical Data Exchange Solution, MDES, healthcare information technology, healthcare communication and information technology, health information exchange, electronic health record, clinical systems interoperability, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, Canada Health Infoway, Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, eHealth conference

Links / URLs:

• More about the Cisco Medical Data Exchange Solution: http://cisco.com/web/strategy/healthcare/all_medical-grade.html
• e-Health conference in Quebec City: http://e-healthconference.com
• IHE as an industry standard and health information exchange framework: http://www.ihe.net/
• The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) selected the IHE framework and its XDS profile. The HITSP's mission is to enable healthcare interoperability in America: http://www.hitsp.org/
• The pan-Canadian EHR architecture blueprint defined by Canada Health Infoway leverages the IHE framework: http://www.infoway-inforoute.ca/lang-en
• More about the XDS and XDS-I IHE profiles fully supported by MDES: http://wiki.ihe.net/index.php?title=Cross_Enterprise_Document_Sharing