30 May 2012

NHS Integration: Integrella Shines at 2012 NHS Hack Day

From creating an integration solution that integrates a CRM with an iPhone app to introducing our new cloud integration platform, Integrella made its mark on how we’re innovating data sharing and integration in the healthcare sector.

There’s no doubt that the future of healthcare — as well as the success of the NHS — relies heavily on the successful integration of advanced medicine with technology. As healthcare becomes increasingly complex, so too do the requirements for sharing and accessing data. On an administrative level, it is a necessity to make scheduling, billing, and other operational processes lean, accurate, and scalable. From the treatment standpoint, doctors and patients rely on detailed, accurate, and timely sharing of critical health data, which can mean the difference in prognoses, recovery, and even life or death.

These critical stakes in NHS-focused integration and technology are precisely why NHS Hack Day exists.

NHS Hack Day is an event that “brings together software developers, doctors, and health care leaders to create disruptive solutions to problems in the health space.” The term “disruptive” might seem like hyperbole, but it isn’t: the NHS needs big, bold solutions when its comes to data integration, which is why Integrella has been so excited to have partaken in this year’s event. It was an opportunity for us to really demonstrate our expertise when it comes to healthcare-based integration, and feel as though we made our mark.

Integrella sent Malcolm Newbury and Simone Avossa to this year’s NHS Hack Day, and their Bleep Bleep project team tackled a particularly critical problem in healthcare: communication amongst doctors and staff. The specific project, or “problem space,” that they sought to solve was to develop a solution for the “chaos and wasted effort caused by the urgent need to communicate with colleagues” and “the proliferation of different communication devices and inevitable permanence of pagers within hospitals.”

To be sure, both “chaos” and “wasted effort” are particularly disturbing characterisations for communication between those who are responsible for the health of Great Britain’s patients.

Integrella’s contributions to solving the problem included developing an integration solution that integrates a CRM with an iPhone app, as well as the use of Integrella’s new cloud integration platform to integrate the applications — and we managed to do all of this in the space of 24 hours.

nhs integration
Mobile computing is bound to play a critical role in the future of healthcare.

Malcolm Newbury worked on CiviCRM, a mature, fully functional open source contact management system, which can be maintained directly by individual clinicians and hospital administrators for departmental info. Joe Hughes crafted the accompanying iPhone app, which captures, updates and displays the clinician’s ‘community of interest’ contacts numbers (the iPhone app was developed in the first day).

Integrella’s Simone Avossa worked on MULE ESB, an open source integration engine capable of using REST and SOAP protocols to extract a clinicians’ relevant community of interest information from CiviCRM and push it with updates to the clinicians smartphone. Finally, Sean Radford worked on a multi-platform workflow application capable of capturing and using call data (peer – peer) generated by each phone.

The result of these efforts was the ability to give clinicians up-to-date phone, pager, and email details of all relevant contacts within the clinician’s community of interest, so that they could make a call without having to look up or request details from a third party (ie the switchboard)- providing the ability to log and add meta data to the call, which provides call analytics, location, priority, purpose, call back details etc.
Integrella placed in the top 3 award winners at the show.
The integration of mobile computing technology, utilisation of cloud storage, and an easy, seamless data sharing solution is precisely the kind of innovation that needs to take place within the NHS, and Integrella are excited about being at the forefront on it.
Thanks for reading our article! Are you interested in hearing more about what Integrella can do for organisations within the NHS? Be sure to contact us with any questions.
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