Integrated Medical Information Management

Fireflower has designed a Medical Information Management service that integrates all aspects of administration, practice and research in health care.

The service makes life easier for family doctors/general practitioners, and makes life safer for their patients. The system deals with all medical concerns and treatments which come before family doctors. Files are always up to date, and when laboratory and other tests are performed, the relevant patient’s record is seen by the person doing the test. The filing system is automated so that information from most diagnostic tests cannot be misfiled. Information is tagged so that only authorized, relevant personnel have access to tagged information. Medical receptionists enter much of the data into the system, on an ‘enter once, use many times’ basis, thus reducing the typological errors that may occur when data has to be entered many times. On leaving hospital, patients receive information directly related to their hospital treatment and their diagnosed conditions for on-going health care.

The IMIM System

A basic Fireflower module collects all data related to individual patients who attend a medical clinic, including dates and times of visits or telephone calls, clinical staff involved, examinations, tests, treatments, drug prescriptions, and reports to and from laboratories and specialists. All data entered by clinical staff or receptionists are automatically recorded and sent to a central server which manages the data. All metadata related to every record (who entered the data, date and time) is also automatically recorded. Since the data is centralized, individual patient’s files can be accessed, with patient permission, by laboratories, hospitals, out patient clinics, and wherever else treatments and consultations are given. All letters and reports are digital and are transmitted instantaneously so that individual files are immediately updated wherever a person receives medical treatment or advice, or whenever tests or scans are performed. A confirmation that reports have been read by the right people, on receipt, is also provided.

This module provides the simultaneous use of a patient’s files by multiple hospitals and clinics (with patient permission), where an individual’s details can be seen and searched by different doctors at different places at the same time. It also provides the facility for anonymizing copies of patients’ files so they can be searched in concert with other patients’ files while looking for correlations. Multiple searches can be carried out across a hospital, city, province or nation.

Other modules deal with public and environmental health issues, and basic medical and pharmaceutical research. Wherever necessary, and with patient permission, these supplementary modules can access and ‘talk to’ anonymized patient files from the basic module.

Advantages

• All IMIM modules can merge into larger Fireflower datasets without data collision
• All files can be read simultaneously by different people, though with highly restricted and sophisticated permissions to edit them.
• All the data is secured, backed up and mirrored at distant sites to prevent catastrophic loss of data, and all data in and out of the Fireflower servers is encrypted.
• All data transfers for research purposes are anonymized and cannot happen without patient permission.
• No transfers of data are needed when a patient changes his family doctor, or moves to another city or province - the patient’s records can be seen instantly from anywhere in the world and in many languages, again only with permission.
• All computer maintenance is done at the servers with no down time. Fireflower will provide wireless enabled tablet computers for secure access to its biomedical centres, which are continuously connected to a centralized server through long range wireless and satellite connections.
• All necessary software upgrades are automatically installed at the Fireflower servers which provide 24/7 service. There is no need for an individual user to install software.
• Doctors or researchers are never without their own data wherever they are.