Intalgent

Fisher-Titus Medical Center: Innovative Solution Ensures Physicians' Continued Access to Patient Data

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Fisher-Titus Medical Center (FTMC), the largest and most comprehensive health care provider in Huron County, Ohio, supports 20 affiliated physicians in remote offices, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and a host of other programs and services for over 4,000 community members. The large amount of sensitive data generated by this medical center demands a scalable, efficient, and easily maintained data management system.

For six years, FTMC’s network of physicians used Siemens Medical Solutions’ SMS PhysicianConnect to manage their patient data. However, upon Siemens’ announcement that they would no longer support this application, FTMC contacted Siemens regarding the feasibility of extracting the patient data from the existing clinical repositories. Unfortunately, Siemens was not able to quickly provide a conversion routine that would process all of the various clinical data types. Without the support of the product’s vendor, FTMC was forced to find an external partner to design and develop a complete solution to handle this large data extraction task.

FTMC had three primary goals with this data extraction project:

• Ensure that historical patient data is retained and easily accessible by physicians
• Develop a solution quickly and within a limited budget
• Migrate almost one million patient records completely and efficiently from a proprietary legacy system to a secure format that is easily printable for inclusion in a paper chart

FTMC looked to Intalgent to design and manage their data extraction project. Intalgent completed an exhaustive assessment of each clinical data type including a review of each field and its corresponding relationships between other data repositories. After each clinical data type’s assessment was completed, visual mock-ups were created that demonstrated the final layout and presentation of the clinical data.

After all the clinical data types had been assessed, an efficient and scalable Java-based application was developed to extract a patient’s historical data including demographic information, diagnostic reports, scanned documents, and radiology images from the existing repositories and, additionally, dynamically create an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. Since the data is stored in PDF, a read-only format, this ensures that the information is secure and cannot be modified.

While developing a solution for FTMC, Intalgent worked to meet the compliance regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). This act incurred new federal regulations which require physicians to ensure the privacy and security of patient medical records and employ a standard format when submitting electronic transactions. Under HIPAA, records must be maintained two years after a patient’s death, and according to the Medicare Conditions of Participation, all hospitals must retain patient records for 5 years. Intalgent helped FTMC meet these compliance standards by developing a comprehensive and secure mechanism to extract and store their legacy patient data from SMS PhysicianConnect.

Intalgent successfully helped FTMC achieve their goals:

“Intalgent’s innovative thinking about how to solve our problem has made this project a success.”

John Britton
Director of Information Systems
Fisher-Titus Medical Center