by Aziz Boxwala
We are excited that Elimu has been awarded an SBIR grant by the National Institute on Aging. The grant funds a research project to create and evaluate context-relevant views of electronic health records (EHRs). A context-relevant view consolidates, and displays, data pertinent to a particular issue that the clinician might be addressing into a single view. Studies have shown…
by Jim Shalaby
Here we are, a company focused on semantics and interoperability, proclaiming our support for admittedly somewhat arbitrary lab categories... Given a thousand distinct lab results, how likely is it that individual clinicians would group them into the same categories (such as ‘chemistry tests’, ‘hematology tests’, etc)…
by Elimu Informatics
In their November 2017 report, the Office of the National Coordinator’s Sync for Genes project emphasizes the need for “pilots that test FHIR Genomics for Genomic Archiving and Communication System (GACS) integration with EHRs”. We support this direction, both as a viable mechanism for greater genomics-EHR integration, and because it opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for genomics clinical decision support (CDS). In this blog we’ll take a closer look at these possibilities…
by Aziz Boxwala
EHRs come with a certain level of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) capabilities. However, there are times when clinicians need to see or process information in ways that aren’t natively supported within the EHR. In these scenarios, SMART-on-FHIR CDS apps can be invaluable in providing CDS to aid in patient care…
by Jim Shalaby
Elimu is the Swahili word for knowledge. We chose this name because our products and services provide clinicians with the knowledge they need to care for their patients. Elimu can also mean education. In the spirit of knowledge and education, we are beginning our Knowledge Sharing program. The intent of this program is to share tools and information at no charge. Periodically, we’ll share something new. To kick off the program this month, we’re sharing our Immunization mapping tables…
by Jim Shalaby
As EHR data has tremendously grown over the past nine years (incentivized by Meaningful Use under the HITECH Act of 2009), we’re faced with the growing challenge of retrieving accurate and consistent data, whether it be for quality reporting, Clinical Decision Support (CDS) or general analytics. Why is getting accurate and consistent data such a problem…
by Aziz Boxwala
Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is a recent standard from the Object Management Group for modeling decision rules. Its first version was published in September 2015. With tools supporting DMN becoming available now, there is an increasing interest in its use.
DMN is designed to be very friendly for business users (not developers) to create and manage decision rules. More on that in a bit. DMN also is intended to be a rules language that is independent of proprietary tools…
by Elimu Informatics
Pharmacogenomics (PGx) is often considered low-hanging fruit for genomics-EHR integrations, and many have expressed the notion that drug-gene interaction checking might one day become as much a commodity in EHRs as drug-drug and drug-allergy checking.
PGx use cases are of particular interest because over half of all primary care patients are exposed to PGx relevant drugs [Bell, 2014]. Studies have found that 7% of FDA-approved medications and 18% of the 4 billion prescriptions written in the US per year are affected by actionable PGx variants…
In part 1 of this post, we discussed the pros and cons of cloud-based services for clinical decision support (CDS), and how CDS-Hooks is wiping those cons away. In this post, we’ll explore when to use cloud-based CDS services, and how to prioritize which clinical requirements to first address with these services.
The big advantage of cloud-based CDS services is that...
by Aziz Boxwala
Many studies have shown that clinical decision support (CDS) can positively impact the behavior of providers, leading to better patient care. Despite that fact, adoption and implementation of CDS remains limited. Much of the CDS that is implemented today is of the simplistic, off-the-shelf drug-drug interaction checking variety. This is in large part due to the effort required to design and implement effective CDS. Whether you purchase CDS content and rules from a vendor, or author them in-house, integrating them into your EHR system and deploying it in your institution is not for the faint-of-heart...
by Aziz Boxwala
Interoperability of health IT systems has been, and continues to be, a challenge. If you’re like most in healthcare, you’re constantly coming up with “workarounds” to get your EHR to provide or accept data to and from various systems. The results of these workarounds is often a less than ideal user experience for the people you’re trying to serve - your clinicians. How many of you out there have settled for creating a PDF and pushing it into your EHR via MDM? Fear not, you’re not alone, and help is on the way in the form of HL7 FHIR!...
by Jim Shalaby
Both PSMI and Meliorix have worked closely together on some very exciting and challenging projects over the past few years. We discovered in the process that we had a great deal of synergy, Meliorix with expertise in decision support standards, design, deployment and PSMI in clinical content, terminologies, rules content, pathways and knowledge management. When Aziz and I started talking about joining forces in 2017
