LiveData OR-Dashboard completes 2010 IHE North American Connectathon

LiveData, a leading innovator in real-time data integration and display, today announced that the technology underlying LiveData OR-Dashboard, has successfully completed the 2010 IHE North American Connectathon, a proving ground for medical device integration. LiveData OR-Dashboard captures, synchronizes, and integrates all relevant data from any medical device or system, transforms and presents it as meaningful information on easy-to-read graphic displays, delivering a complete, fully integrated view of the surgical case as it progresses.

“No medical device is an island. Indeed, no clinician is an island, every element of the OR is an integral part of a team”

OR-Dashboard and other LiveData perioperative workflow solutions are based on the company's Real-Time Integration (RTI) engine, a middleware platform for rapidly deploying applications that require real-time integration of disparate data. Two of RTI's inter-device communications advances were tested, demonstrated, and accepted at The Connectathon.

The Connectathon is the healthcare IT industry's largest interoperability testing event. Now in its 11th year, the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) 2010 North America Connectathon provided a detailed implementation and testing process to promote the adoption of standards-based interoperability.

During a Connectathon, participants' systems exchange information with systems from many other participating organizations, performing all of the transactions required for the roles they have selected, in support of defined clinical functions. This year, more than 100 vendors (including such companies as Cerner, Epic, GE, McKesson, Siemens, etc.) tested more than 150 healthcare IT systems. During this fourth consecutive year of the company's Connectathon participation, LiveData's Device Enterprise Communication and Alarm Communication Management profiles underwent interoperability testing with a variety of medical devices and Health Information Systems.

The Device Enterprise Communication (DEC) profile addresses the need for consistent communication of Patient Care Device (PCD) data to the enterprise. Enterprise recipients of PCD data include Clinical Decision Support applications, Clinical Data Repositories (CDRs), Electronic Medical Record applications, and Electronic Health Records.

In the Alarm Communication Management profile, alarms are routed to end devices for notification of caregivers, or to other systems that record patient care information. These alarms may be physiological (such as a heart rate above or below a safe range for the patient), or technical (reflecting conditions in the patient care devices themselves that may require action, such as ECG leads off the patient). The intent here is to give a uniform way of representing such common alarm conditions in HL7 messages to facilitate interoperability of systems from different vendors.

"No medical device is an island. Indeed, no clinician is an island, every element of the OR is an integral part of a team,” said John Hotchkiss, vice president of research and development at LiveData. "The HIMSS showcase demonstrates how interoperability of systems contributes to improved patient safety, operational efficiency and reduced costs. By participating in Connectathon, and the HIMSS interoperability showcase, LiveData once again demonstrates our leadership in these critical areas of patient care."

As the industry’s proving grounds, the Connectathon is part of the mandatory preparation for upcoming Interoperability Showcase events, including the HIMSS10 conference in Atlanta, March 1-3. LiveData has been accepted into the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase for the fourth consecutive year.

The HIMSS Interoperability Showcase illustrates how interoperability drives improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of care. As in previous years, the Showcase highlights IHE's common framework and Interoperability Specifications for delivering interoperability across local, regional and national health information exchanges.