Optimizing Work Flow for Eye Care Hospitals

Abstract

Health standards i.e. Health Level 7 (HL-7), Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) etc are being defined in order to have communication and data sharing between different eye hospitals and clinics. As patients move around the healthcare ecosystem, their electronic health records must be available, discoverable, and understandable. Further, to support automated clinical decision support and other machine-based processing, the data must also be structured and standardized. OpenMRS is a collaborative project to develop software to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. It is intended as a workflow automation that many organizations can adapt to develop a system. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) promotes the coordinated use of HL7 standards to address the clinical needs. IHE standards support clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services, and are recognized as the most commonly used in the world. FHIR is a new specification based on emerging industry approaches. In this research, we aim to improve healthcare workflows for ophthalmology based on IHE radiology workflow. In order to achieve this goal, we have blended IHE radiology workflow, Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and middleware of MIRTH connect engine to optimize eye care workflows. We have specifically used HL7 v2.5, v2.6 and DICOM standard 3.0 to maintain backward compatibility with DICOM supported machines. The proposed workflow is tested for different case studies related to eye care facility