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The basic premise of this proposal is that more affordable and effective health care can be achieved by applying modern computer technology to improve the collaboration among the diverse and distributed providers in the health care arena.
This premise is based on the belief that information sharing, communication, and coordination are basic elements of any collaborative endeavour. In the health care domain, collaboration is the cooperative activities of health care providers aiming to deliver total and real-time care for their patients. Communication between providers and managed access to distributed patient records should enable health care providers to make informed decisions about their patients in a timely manner. Patients should have universal access to the services of any convenient provider, and providers should be able to use relevant information from even the last episode of care in the patient record. Such a patient-centered perspective is in keeping with the real mission of health care providers.
However, this scenario does not reflect current practice despite the fact that today's technology makes several of these operations possible right now. For example, elements of patient records (including information such as X-ray images) can be shared interactively among physicians; physicians can access some remote databases containing pertinent diagnostic information; and high speed, robust communication links can be established between patient care centers.
Why aren't these capabilities being utilized to improve the effectiveness of health care delivery?
We believe the answer lies in the fact that an easy-to-use (from the provider perspective) integrated implementation of these capabilities has not occurred to date in any community. Large health care systems have deployed partial and disparate systems that address different elements of the problem. But these islands of automation have not been integrated to facilitate cooperation among health care providers in large communities or nationally.
We have formed a balanced consortium of computer system developers, practicing rural physicians, community care groups, health care researchers, and tertiary care facilities that is committed to provide a solution.
Our team is prepared to provide a collaborative health care venture by deploying a set of software systems, in a growing number of health care facilities, in a phased manner, and to demonstrate:
Collaboration among health care providers can be leveraged via health care networks, which consist of a group of providers working together with a common vision and goal. Implementing such networks will require active collaboration between innovators, systems developers and integrators who will forge a path that allows a phased migration of technologies and practices.
The Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) and its team members at Valley Health Systems, Inc., Cabell Huntington Hospital, and St. Mary's Hospital propose to exploit the available technologies (both research and commercial off-the-shelf systems) into a field-validated, open collaboration environment for the health care domain and to demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing the cost of health care.
ARTEMIS is being commercialized by CareFlow|Net, Inc.
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