2006-09-21
eHealth Record Integration: Siemens and InferMed increase the efficiency of Electronic Data Capture
Preliminary results of the Siemens and InferMed Direct Data Capture pilot taking place at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were yesterday announced at the ExL Pharma’s 2nd Merging Electronic Health Record and Electronic Data Capture Conference in Washington, D.C.
The project, which has been piloted on a TUM breast cancer chemotherapy study, links InferMed’s MACRO EDC application, to a pre-existing electronic health record via the Siemens OPENLink ™ and SOARIAN® portal (Siemens Medical Press Release). Among the preliminary results announced was a significant and measurable reduction in the effort required by clinicians to enter subject data for the trial.
The innovative solution works in real-time as clinicians at the Technical University of Munich use MACRO to collect study data - when an eForm is opened, an automatic check ascertains whether any of the required information for the form is already available in the subject’s existing electronic health record. If relevant data is found (such as date of birth) it is presented to the clinician who can choose to disregard the information or automatically insert it into the eForm – eliminating the redundancy and inconvenience created by entering the information a second time.
The pilot is the result of a 12-month partnership aimed at integrating MACRO with the SOARIAN® medical portal in a move that could also enable other SOARIAN® customers to integrate disparate data sources with MACRO.
Speaking on the eve of the Washington conference Martin Ryan, InferMed’s Business Development Director said, “Maximising the efficiency of clinical staff is something that we are passionately committed to at InferMed and runs to the very heart of both our EDC and decision support-based applications. As such, we are delighted to be part of this revolutionary project and hope that in the future, clinicians across the world can benefit from the efforts of Siemens, the Technical University of Munich and InferMed alike."
