Visit to Himss16 in Vegas

Just returned for Himss16 and a lot of experiences and new contacts richer. What a week and what a town Las Vegas are. 

Our purpose of visiting Himss16 was to engage in dialogue with vendors that have equipment and IT software solutions that will help New OUH achieve the goals that are set for the construction project. At the moment in the construction project, we are focusing on two major areas within equipment and IT. They are:

1. The future patient room and Operation room and new equipment in those premises
2. Clinical logistics, service logistics and booking including the ambitious use of a RTLS platform (se paper for more information).

Our focus area was therefore not typical clinical systems like electronic healthcare records and other clinical systems like PACS. We needed to broaden our horizon and learn from the frontrunners of our field - Himss16 was essential in achieving that goal.

New Odense University Hospital will engage in Call for Vendors in 2016/17 and forward until the new building/hospital is ready for use in 2022. The visit to Himss16 was designed to inspire our project team and create knowledge for further dialogue and/or create input to requirements for further purchase.

We were looking for innovative solutions that can change and/or effect the care delivered within the hospital. It could be vendors that have products like:

• New digital beds
• Healthcare Robots
• RFID based systems
• Supply chain management systems
• Unit dose medication robots
• New ways of accessing EHR data
• New mobile equipment as radiology equipment
• New ways (apps maybe) of using our RTLS platform – beyond just finding equipment and clinicians
• IT systems within the clinical logistics, service logistics and booking area and solutions that connects the three.

We got a lot of help form  Invest in Denmark and ended with 15 booked meetings and a lot of informal ones as well. We will use our new inspiration in our enterprise architecture work and hopefully be ready to meet you all again - at least when we make the big call for software and digital solutions for the New Hospital.

Thank you Rebecca and Michael from Invest in Denmark - you were great.

I even got to speak at the following events:

• Invest in Denmark, Foreign ministry round table session with American vendors (50 participants)
• Nordic delegation on “New Technologies for data collection and usage” (150 participant from the Nordic countries)
• Belgium delegation, keynote speak on “Have we forgot the enterprise? Health IT is also about logistics” (60 participants

Effective logistics is the new battleground for a quality healthcare system - Read my new article

The Danish government decided in 2008 to spend 10 billion Euros on 16 new hospital construction projects. In Odense, the budget is totally 1.3 billion Euros and will be approximately 220.000 m2. The hospital will be ready in 2022.

TOGAF as a framework has been used in order to secure a coherent and semi-automated logistics system, where:

• clinical logistics
• service logistics
• planning/scheduling

(the logistics complex) are the central elements. The project has identified those three areas as interdependent and most important, leaving out systems like electronic health records (EHR).

It has been crucial for the project that clinicians do not interact with the service logistics system, but instead focus on their clinical workflow through interaction only with the clinical systems at the hospital. A real time location system (RTLS) has been acquired, so it is possible to track mobile equipment, beds, trolleys, patients and personnel. Based on the exact position of equipment or personnel/patients, tasks can be created or registration made automatically in the surrounding application.

The new logistics solution will help the hospital cope with fewer beds, be more efficient and increase quality overall. TOGAF has proven itself as a reliable framework in order to map the business architecture of the future and select and design appropriate information system architecture and technology architecture.

Download my article on the subject