In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, the incidence of medical errors is often the result of providers lacking the benefit of a full medical history for the patients they treat and, as a result, diagnosis and treatment decisions are sometimes based on partial – and often unreliable and inaccurate – information provided by the patients and/or their families.

That is one reason why forward-thinking organizations like regional health information organizations (RHIOs), integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and health information networks (HINs) are expressing a greater interest in Health Information Exchange with the goal of providing universal access to patient data across a disparate network of healthcare organizations – hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, etc., – in a given geographic region.

dbMotion is a provider of Web-based data-sharing technology that helps facilitate health information exchange for RHIOs, IDNs and HINs. Based on a serviceoriented architecture (SOA), the dbMotion™ Solution gives these organizations secure access to select components of patient medical files maintained at facilities that are otherwise unconnected or have no common technology through which to share data. This is accomplished by creating a “Virtual Patient Record” that integrates relevant patient medical information and makes it available to applications and caregivers at the point of care.

In order to understand the potential impact this technology can have on patient care, consider the following example: A patient goes to a cardiology clinic complaining of chest discomfort. He states he has been having this discomfort three to four times per week and his worst episode awoke him early that morning. Physical examination is normal and the ECG shows unclear changes. What the cardiologist may not know, without access to information from prior visits with other caregivers or even the patient himself, is that the patient’s very recent stress nuclear test – which was done for the same symptoms – was negative, and that identical ECG changes were documented at that time. The availability of these tests and images would be invaluable for the cardiologist in avoiding an unnecessary work-up.

The dbMotion Solution has been fully operational for the past six years – its implementations serve close to 5 million patients representing more than 2 billion individual records of clinical information. The solution has received awards and international recognition, including being named “Best in Class” winner in the Interoperability/RHIO category of the 2006 Microsoft Healthcare Users Group (MS-HUG) Annual Awards and winning the Acute Care: Clinical/Patient Information Systems category of the 2005 MS-HUG Annual Awards.