TeraMedica unveils electronic health record solution

Milwaukee-The medical industry right now faces issues of connectivity and compatibility between clinicians dealing with different sets of data gathered through a variety of proprietary technologies. This splintering of technology in turn leads to a splintering of the data itself, making it difficult to consider a patient’s entire health record as opposed to just certain parts of it.

A new attempt to fill this need has come from Milwaukee-based TeraMedica Healthcare Technology and their recently announced WADOWeb Universal Electronic Health Record Image Viewer, a complement to their Evercore Clinical Information Manager.

The WADOWeb (the acronym “WADO” stands for “Web Access to DICOM Objects) solution will allow enterprises to gather the data from all these disparate sources under a unified, non-proprietary architecture that could interface with many existing platforms and allow a patient’s health record to be accessed over the Web. This represents an advance over previous solutions in which different client systems would have to communicate point-to-point and with difficulties sharing images along with the basic health data of the patient.

“So the key point of all this is to conglomerate and serve up in a single look and feel,” explained TeraMedica vice president of technology and marketing Paul Markham. “That’s good, but moreover there’s a term in the marketplace at the moment…and it’s a term that is not just interoperability, which means connectivity of pieces—we’re doing that—but moreover we’re addressing the problem that everybody’s trying to solve, and that’s semantic interoperability.”

Markham said the draw of this new technology is the ability to not only store images or store text but to present a unified database of a patient’s whole history, accessible over the Web in a non-proprietary format. This will enable doctors to examine the whole patient, not just the present symptoms, and better coordinate treatments. Additionally, Markham said the system would better enable enterprises to expand their system architecture or even replace whole sections while still retaining data and interoperability, thus minimizing transition costs. Markham said this sort of feature is finding its way into the formats used by equipment and software providers as a result of market demand for interoperable standards and consequences for those firms that do not yet supply cross-compatible equipment.

“All of them are on the bandwagon basically because they have to be,” Markham explained. “They’re being forced by chief information officers.”

The system will cost anywhere between $150,000 and $1 million, depending on the scale of the enterprise, the variety of data and equipment that will be used with the system, and other professional services, according to Markham.