Electronic Medical Record Interoperability

September 28, 2010 4:00 PM

Anyone have experience with MedInformatix?

I have a medical imaging practice as a client. They want to dump MedInformatix for another system, but they are afraid of losing access to their existing records.

Their specific concern is with the MedInformatix "digital signatures". In the documentation, I found that the digital signature literally is a digitized doctor's or technician's signature, and once signed, the electronic record is then locked and unmodifiable. But the client seemed to be speaking in terms of cryptographic signatures, in which case I can understand their concern.

I'm not sure if they're confusing terms, but I'm also not sure it matters: from what I could find, interoperability is foundational to medical information systems, to prevent things like vendor lock-in.

First, is my understanding correct, that regardless of the software's information assurance functions, the information itself can be at least read by another product?

Second, can my client export their MedInformatix records and import to whichever product they ultimately choose, including retaining access to the signed records?

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (2 answers total)

There's no easy way to get all your chart documents from old EMR A to different EMR B. For instance, the EMR that we run encrypts all the files on the server. I can't just simply copy the files over to a new EMR server and be able to open it.

One way to take care of this would be to export each patient's chart into a common format like PDF and then import that into the new EMR software. I would speak to the new EMR vendor and see if they can automate this or have any better ideas. If they want a sale, they should make the transition as easy as possible for the client.

Regarding digital signatures, it sounds like they are possibly confusing it as well. Documents should be locked/unmodifiable once it has been digitally signed, it . This prevents anyone from going back into old chart notes three months later and modifying the contents. Think billing fraud. I don't see why they would need to go back into old documents, other than to view. I'm not sure what their concern is exactly. You want your documents to be encrypted on the hard drive, this prevents anyone from simply copying patient files and opening them.

Feel free to MeMail me, if you have any questions or need clarification.
posted by aGee at 4:54 PM on September 28, 2010

Sounds like you just need to program your own middleware. MS Access or some flavor of a SQL database. As for the digital signatures, I'd look at how things are actually signed in the application. You might only need to export-import the time & user who signed something.
posted by Lukenlogs at 6:47 PM on September 28, 2010