NUI Galway Technology to Improve Health Care Integration

Monday, 9 March 2009

A technology to enable integration between hospital IT systems has been developed by researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway. The breakthrough technology has now been licensed to Irish company Slidepath, which specialises in software solutions for capturing clinical research data. The integration of electronic patient records in a healthcare setting has so far proved problematic. Healthcare professionals have long been concerned that electronic patient record systems have become islands of information, with little or no interoperability. DERI's solution is called Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records (PPEPR) and uses the latest application of semantics, in which over 100 researchers at DERI specialise. It is planned to utilise PPEPR to optimally interface between Slidepath's Distiller solution and other Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems in the live clinical setting. Slidepath's Distiller is a web-enabled clinical research solution which is ideal for the requirements of clinical research data management and hospital led clinical trials. "Slidepath is very excited by this technical collaboration", says Donal O Shea, CEO of Slidepath. "As a rapidly developing technology company in the clinical research support domain, this development will enable Slidepath to optimally capture clinical data from existing laboratory information management system and electronic patient record environments. It is a great development to collaborate with DERI, one of Ireland s leading research institutes, to help commercialise part of the innovative technologies under development at NUI Galway". Ronan Fox, leader of the Health Care and Life Sciences research group in DERI, NUI Galway, said: "Solutions to date have been shown to be technological dead-ends, limiting the reuse of the business knowledge inherent in integration projects. With PPEPR, not alone is codeless integration possible, knowledge is encapsulated through the use of semantics, enabling its reuse in other applications. Funding by Enterprise Ireland has brought PPEPR to this stage of maturity and through our association with Slidepath we will continue to advance the use of semantics as a valuable tool in the provision of healthcare".
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