Mid last week, GE and Boston Scientific made an interesting announcement wherein Boston Scientific’s patient monitoring platform, LATITUDE will be able to automatically update a patient’s Centricity-based electronic medical record (EMR).
Currently, cardiologists use LATITUDE to remotely monitor a patient’s defibulator implant, but this data is collected and stored separately, outside of a patient’s core medical record. LATITUDE appears popular with strong adoption since its introduction in 2005 as Boston Sci. claims that 1,700 clinics now use the software to monitor over 70,000 patients.
While LATITUDE has seen strong adoption, a major shortcoming of the software has been lack of connectivity/interoperability to allow LATITUDE data to automatically populate a patients health record within a clinic’s EMR system. With this partnership, at least those who are using Centricity, cardiologists and others responsible for a patient’s care will be better able to track a patient’s well-being, collaborate where necessary and hopefully lead to better outcomes, or at least better internal workflow and thus efficiencies.
Did try contacting Boston Scientific to ask if this was an exclusive deal with GE. No response. Hopefully, for their sake and the broader market, it is not exclusive as GE is far from the leading solution out there in the EMR market.
And taking it in another direction, wonder if Boston Scientific is working with Microsoft to have LATITUDE and their devices also interoperate with HealthVault. Seems quite logical as in their press release, they also mention how LATITUDE is also being combined with wireless weight scale and blood pressure monitoring equipment that they are now taking to market to provide more comprehensive wellness data to a physician.
I hope they make an open interface, so other EMRs, as well as home-grown EMRs can integrate with the platform. Microsoft has done a good job with Healthvault in creating on open API, complete with detailed documentation, SDK, and working sample code. I wish others also take this approach. Only then will we start to see true inter-operability in healthcare IT.
Mark Singh MD
http://www.clinicore.blogspot.com
Yes Mark, I hope that they have an “open” interface to LATITUDE as well to allow for greater opportunities for physicians & hospitals to automatically add such data directly to a patient’s complete electronic health record as there will be others, outside of the cardiologist that will have an interest in seeing such information.
Not all that surprising that Microsoft, whose raison d’être is software, would know what to provide ISVs, not so sure about Boston Scientific. Hopefully they can learn a thing or two from Microsoft and others in this regard.