MEDITRAIN Success Stories
Interfaces
The Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information (NLCHI) was established in 1996 to provide quality information to health professionals, consumers and parties involved in planning and decision-making in the provincial health system.
Early in its mandate it was understood that a Unique Patient Identifier (UPI) tied to a central Client Registry was the cornerstone of any effort to implement a province wide Health Information Network (HIN). With multiple platforms, MEDITECH being just one, NLCHI was presented with an extraordinary challenge. www.nlchi.nf.ca/upi.php
In 2000 MEDITRAIN entered into an agreement with NLCHI to provide the interfacing required to perform this task for all the provincial MEDITECH installs. A method was needed to extract real time UPI information and to provide the UPI at registration time to any of the MEDITECH installs. The effect was to give 8 separate MEDITECH installs, (and other non MEDITECH entities with separate Master Patient Indexes) the appearance of one common global database with one common identifier. This approach allows NLCHI to not only collect pertinent data from MEDITECH systems from Labrador to Newfoundland but to collect data from non-MEDITECH entities in the same area.
The technical aspects included obtaining information real time from geographically dispersed sites and doing the same in reverse at registration time. Within an aggressive twelve month period, MEDITRAIN helped NLCHI develop and implement its strategy. In MEDITECH whenever a patient's demographic information is entered or changed this information is passed along to the non-MEDITECH NLCHI global database. The global database acquires demographic information from many separate unrelated sources and links all this separate demographic information to the correct person. Once this has been done, the global database assigns a unique ID to that person. At this point each of the separate sites may have different information concerning the same person. It is the NLCHI global database, which has combined all this data and assembled the correct record and assigned the one unique ID. On the MEDITECH registration side the business process is altered to have registration clerks select the patient from the NLCHI database, and have the NLCHI database update the site MEDITECH database with the proper demographic information. At this point MEDITRAIN provided an application that seamlessly incorporated the non-MEDITECH NLCHI registration application with the MEDITECH registration application, taking data from NLCHI and updating the MEDITECH site with accurate demographic information.
The result now is that NLCHI has a UPI for the entire province. This centralized UPI can now be used for a host of other applications including online prescribing and test ordering, reductions in adverse drug events (ADEs), medication and diagnostic service histories, etc. For more information on this project visit www.nlchi.nf.ca/bdbc.php
