2010-11-10 Avoiding the Fall of Babel: Using Standards to Enable Communication Between Health Care Systems, Michael Donnelly of Epic

When you go to the emergency room, will the doctors have the information they need to take care of you? Those doctors can save critical time and money if they know your allergies, medications and ongoing medical problems. Access to that data can also prevent them from going down the wrong path thus reducing the risk of harming you.

Hospitals and clinics are replacing their paper charts with electronic medical record systems.  That change gives doctors and nurses quick and easy access to your medical information over the Internet.  Data exchanged by doctors and nurses require standards. And those standards help save lives at a significant financial benefit to the medical organizations.

This talk will discuss the standards that enable this communication, the process by which those standards are formed, and their workflow and security implications.  This will include discussion of standards and implementation profiles from www.hl7.org and www.ihe.net

Michael Donnelly is a software engineer at Epic, a Madison, WI based company that creates software systems for medical groups, hospitals, and integrated healthcare organizations.  Customers include community and multi-hospital systems, academic facilities, children's organizations and safety net providers.

Michael currently works on Care Everywhere, Epic's framework for cross-system interoperability. Previously at Epic he developed graphical tools to make it easier to administer interfaces and before that developed software to optimize machinery and processes in paper factories.  He started programming at age eight on an Apple IIe and was immediately hooked.  Outside work, he is an avid blogger, amateur journalist, and bicyclist.

 Although there will be no food served at this event, feel free to "brown bag" it and bring in food from the outside to eat during the social hour.