MEDICAL DATA SYSTEMS has always seen its role as a supportive member of the NICU team of physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals, as they care for premature babies and a wide variety of critically ill newborns.
By working closely with this team, MDS has created systems that minimize the time and effort of data capture, yet maximizes the type and depth of clinical reports for the patient’s hospital record. MDS has also upheld, as a high priority, the ability to have user-defined analytical functions that contribute to the care of each patient, as well as contributing to quality improvement and patient safety for all of the infants cared for in the hospital’s NICU.
Standards
The Medical Data Systems (MDS) meets the objectives for patient record systems of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) including:
- Support patient care and improve its quality
- Enhance the productivity of healthcare professionals and reduce administrative costs
- Support clinical and health services research
- Accommodate future developments in health care technology, policy management, and finance
- Mechanisms in place to ensure patient data confidentiality
The NIS™ is HL7 compatible and HIPAA compliant. MDS has years of experience in aggregating patient data from multiple NICU’s with maintenance of complete patient and institutional confidentiality.
Current Directions
The extensive information contained within the NIS™ provides a rich resource of data with which analytical queries can be performed on each patient on a concurrent basis. The development of this capacity provides a valuable clinical decision support system, as well as patient-specific alerts and quality care reminders. This real-time use of the query functions can be enhanced by links to relevant evidence-based reviews and other clinical information resources.
Concurrent data analysis gives real-time insights to the appearance of adverse events, as well as care patterns that show potential value to the patients. Benchmarking can be performed within each institution or as part of a collaborative, confidential, data acquisition and analysis program.
