Data is just that, data. Pieces of information that can be acquired, stored and transported as ones (1) and zeros (0). This series of bytes has no value until someone or something starts making sense of it.

Like a mobile app that advises a patient that their blood sugar level is too low, or a product that advises a community physician that their patient has been admitted to the Emergency Department suffering from hypoglycaemia. It could even be an operator, like in the Matrix films, who can read the series of bytes organically. 

Transforming data into meaningful information requires the following activities:

  • data acquisition – the process of extracting and storing data
  • data consumption – the process of accessing data
  • data analysis – the process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modelling data.

Each of these activities has been done by humans for centuries, resulting in the development of knowledge.

Orion Health has a long history of mastering health data acquisition. For more than two decades, we have been delivering successful solutions to this very complex problem and, in doing so, Orion Health has broken the data silos of local Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). This has enabled us to build centralised data repositories.

However, in some cases, utilisation of these centralised data repositories is not high enough and data is not being consumed – which means it is effectively locked in a larger silo. To free this data, we are now focusing our efforts on APIs for digital data consumption and on high quality front-end products, such as EMR Connect, for clinicians or patients to consume data more effectively.

EMR Connect aims to boost the clinician’s knowledge of their patient by accessing clinical data from the wider healthcare community. This product integrates with the clinician’s primary software, such as a Patient Management System, so that EMR Connect can identify the patient in context of this software. It then accesses the corresponding shared record in the Orion Health Amadeus Platform. By facilitating the data consumption by clinicians, EMR Connect leaves the last activity–data analysis–in the hands of skilful and knowledgeable clinicians. This empowers clinicians by providing all the available and relevant patient data from the larger digital health IT ecosystem.

In the future, a network of devices and apps could be leveraged to acquire unprecedented amounts of data. This will then be shared, consumed and analysed to give insightful and meaningful information to both the clinician and the patient. This network could even support patients to take ownership of their own health and will help to reduce the cost of healthcare. Meanwhile, EMR Connect is here to help clinicians navigate within the Big Data information pool that patient records are becoming.

To learn more about EMR Connect and how it integrates a patient’s community-shared record within a clinicians EMR click the button below.

Go to Product