Health Care

Houston Medical Center of Ben Taube and London B. Johnson Hospital is a multi-institutional health care system that sponsors three local system hospitals in three communities across Florida, Dallas FT Worth, and Columbia George. Houston Medical Center of London B. Johnson was created in 1980 when the state of Texas owned University of Houston and Rice University became a private college organization. Houston Medical Center has evolved into a multihospital system with approximately 2.5 million people in George and Florida. In 2005, the health system had over 14,000 employees and 4,500 volunteers. The community and specialty service mission reaching every part of the state of Texas, Florida, and George. London B. Johnson Hospital has over 990-bed, 180 chronic cares, 102 bed pediatric, and rehabilitation hospital located in northwest Houston Medical Center.

Many physicians have joined the care integration initiative because they recognize the need to implement comprehensive information technology and be part of a system that integrates all points of patient care together. If physicians desire to work together, it must be fostered by ensuring that physicians lead physicians, involving physicians in governance, and basing decisions with physician ideas and input. Until recently, most of the hospitals had their own Information Technology departments, Information Technology strategies, and a diversity of Health Information Technology platforms. While integrated Hospital Information System products with minimal interfaces mostly served the community hospitals, the main hospital had evolved its own homegrown messaging system. Joan D. Bilbo (2007), J. K. H. Tan (2003)

Process and organizational integration had become a strategic imperative for the health system, and Information Technology was seen as a critical enabler. Rather than incur the time and expense of a ripping out older system, Houston Medical Center was to create a health information exchange serving all of its sites. The health information exchange patient data repository sites a top each institution's individual Information Technology environment and uses a common interface engine to create an enterprise master patient index. Houston Medical Center of London B. Johnson has conducted a rigorous evaluation of three commercial integration products along with its own proprietary engine. A simple evaluation methodology that included onsite, scripted demonstrations by each vendor, as well as an independent third party evaluation covering, Technology, Usability, Functionality Development time, Operation, and Maintenance, Testing Facilities. Houston Medicare Center of London B Johnson is currently building out its capabilities using Epic's Care Ambulatory as the clinical data repository to standardize data availability and delivery system. Joan D. Bilbo (2007), J. K. H. Tan (2003) Houston Medical Center implemented its first ensemble interfaces for patient registration integration in mid-2002. Ultimately, it is expected that between 500 and 600 individual interfaces will be implemented using ensemble. Houston Medicare Center key qualities include ease of learning, development productivity, system performance, reliability, availability, and technical support. Technical support was rated as excellent, and no downtime has been experienced at this time. Houston Medical Center institutions looked for products that executed on wintel platforms and transaction growth that will meet the current need of their future needs. The platform infrastructure included robust, isolated testing and development partitions that support both online and offline testing. Electronic medical record systems that both have improve quality and prevent waste, linking physician offices, ambulatory care settings, hospitals and care provided at the patient

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