One Viewpoint for Medical Information in Clinical Contexts (OVM)
The aim of the “OneViewMed” (OVM) project was to significantly improve the information situation for medical staff. Work processes were to be simplified and patient safety further increased. To achieve this, Fraunhofer IESE developed a graphical dashboard together with medical staff and the IT departments of Frankfurt University Hospital in order to facilitate the work of medical staff and ensure interoperability between the IT systems used on different wards.
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What it's about:
Optimization of data exchange in patient care
The challenge:
What was the challenge with which the company approached IESE?
The support:
How did IESE specifically support the company?
The result:
What are the most important results of the project and what are the next steps for the company?
Your advantages:
Fraunhofer IESE as your partner for Digital Health
In everyday clinical practice, intensive care units and normal wards often use different hospital information systems (HIS), which are not interoperable with each other and therefore do not enable direct data exchange. As a result, medical staff either do not have important treatment information when transferring patients or have to laboriously retrieve it from different systems. This costs valuable time and increases the risk of potential errors.
The aim of the OneViewMed project was to analyze the specific requirements of doctors at Frankfurt University Hospital and, based on this, to develop a practical concept and implement it as a prototype. The result is a system integrated into the hospital's IT architecture with a graphical user interface that overcomes media discontinuities between different hospital information systems and combines data for specific use cases in patient treatment. As a result, information from different HIS is clearly displayed in a central dashboard, which makes the work of the medical staff much easier.
A typical challenge in everyday clinical practice is the transfer of patients from intensive care to a normal ward. Currently important information, such as medication, has to be transferred manually from one hospital information system to another if the two systems are not interoperable. The conception, design and development of a supplementary IT system that closes this interoperability gap between the HIS was the central task of the project.
Fraunhofer IESE supported the development of the OneViewMed dashboard with its comprehensive expertise in software engineering and medical informatics. Based on a detailed requirements elicitation and analysis, functional and technical designs were created that describe an information dashboard for clinical use. IESE worked closely with medical departments and the IT departments of Frankfurt University Hospital.
Key aspects of the support included the design and optimization of user interfaces and workflows, the development of a suitable software architecture and the development of an interoperability concept. The prototype implementation by the IESE was then evaluated using scientific methods and tested for its practical benefits in everyday clinical practice.
The project delivered groundbreaking results for improving the availability of information in everyday clinical practice. In addition to the prototype implementation, detailed functional and technical concepts were developed for an information dashboard that is specially tailored to the needs of medical staff. The dashboard enables the consolidation and read-only display of data from different hospital information systems (HIS).
The focus was on a specific use case: the transfer of patients from an intensive care unit to a normal ward. At the same time, the dashboard was designed to be so flexible that it can easily be expanded to include other use cases.
A central component is the interoperability concept developed, which is based on the FHIR standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and an FHIR repository. This allows data from various HIS and other sources to be integrated.
Finally, the dashboard was scientifically evaluated. The results showed both high functionality and excellent usability, impressively confirming its suitability for practical use.
The OVM dashboard is therefore a significant step towards improving work processes and the availability of information for medical staff in everyday clinical practice.
Example of an application that can interoperably access data from different wards. On the screens of the application, data from the ICU system, including medication, is integrated with data from the normal ward to which a patient was recently transferred from the ICU. In addition, the entire bed occupancy of the normal ward and the individual ward pathway for each patient are shown. The overview provides doctors and nurses with a compact, quick, summarized and informative overview of critical and important information on a newly transferred patient - this significantly increases the efficiency of information gathering and, thanks to the more complete picture of the patient, also the quality of therapeutic and nursing decisions.
This is what Dr. Michael von Wagner, Medical CMIO of Frankfurt University Medicine and Head of Medical Information Services and Digitization, Apoplex Medical Technologies GmbH, says
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE