Michael A. McNeal, President and CEO, Emergin, www.emergin.com

1. How would you define Healthcare 2.0?

I would define Healthcare 2.0 as being a new phase in healthcare that directly impacts the patient experience for the better. The goal for all healthcare IT companies that are involved in the clinical space, on some level, is to improve processes and workflow without losing the “human touch” in patient care.

Technology life cycles in today’s fast paced IT world are compressing, and the day of “testing the waters” with a new technology no longer apply. Each hospital needs to have a sound IT governance strategy before they begin an implementation, in order to navigate the rapid change occurring in the healthcare environment.

2. If you were building a “hospital of the future” what would you include?

Hospitals that step back and figure out how all their existing systems fit together before deploying an alarm management solution become the biggest success stories. A “hospital of the future” is willing to investigate their work and process flows from the beginning. They are willing to include their nursing, clinical engineering and communication staff in their governance committee. From this process of defining workflow challenges, they are able to create a model that incorporates common nomenclature for bed labels, alarm categories, and a plan for alarm prioritization and filtering. The end result is greater productivity, enhanced patient outcomes and improved care.

3. Where do you see technology making its biggest impact in the healthcare segment?

There’s a lot of hype about SOA; but in healthcare, the rewards are just starting to be realized. To build a true SOA is to take a step back, study the inventory of systems acquired in a hospital over time, build the architecture, plug systems into it and then look for ways to increase operational efficiency. Emergin is driving the change to help hospitals think more strategically about their alarm management planning and design with SOA as a technology blueprint.

4. What role do you see your company’s solutions playing in this environment?

We feel Emergin will have a secure position in the world of Healthcare 2.0. We have gone through 1,000 deployments that enabled us to build over 200 best-in-class off-the-shelf adapters to various legacy systems. Emergin has been involved with failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) studies as well as clinical trials with medical equipment manufacturers. Our deep experience and relationships with patient monitoring vendors is unmatched in the industry. We have built a system with the ability to trace back on patient activity when the alarm is generated. The system is also capable of showing, in real-time and respectively, who the alarm is assigned to, which system it is assigned to, which device is being activated, who reads it, who acknowledges it and when the caregiver responds. By integrating with many disparate systems, and managing the full alarm cycle, we can produce a root cause analysis (RCA) transcript that can recreate the lifecycle of a patient alarm.

Emergin created templates and tools to set standards and architecture to drive conformance over time. We understand that when a hospital is planning or designing their architecture and the development of third-party systems, they have many factors to consider. We’ve found that interoperability is normally not considered until the latter phases of a deployment. We’re trying to educate hospitals that it’s important to include interoperability in the initial acquisition.

Emergin is working with certain reporting organizations that, for the first time, are creating alarm and event management as a category. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (www.ihe.net) has created a Patient Care Device (PCD) subcommittee with which Emergin is involved. The IHE is working with Emergin to drive some standards around how medical devices interface alarms and events. IHE started on cardiology, radiology and lab, and is now expanding into the medical device domain – which we consider our core competence. Because we’ve integrated a lot of the medical equipment, we’re created a standard integrated profile that we make publicly available. Some customers are including those specs in their request for proposals (RFPs).