EMRFindr!
I just got done with the “demo day” of my yearlong senior design project for Systems Engineering at Penn, and figured I’d blog about it.
Senior design is a yearlong project that everyone in the engineering school has to complete- students are split into teams and pick a topic to work on at the start of the year, and work on completing an engineering design in their relevant field of study that helps tackle the problem. The project essentially culminates in demo day, where each group presents their results with posterboards in front of panels of judges.
My systems project dealt with the realm of medical IT— more specifically the issue of electronic medical record systems (EMRs). EMRs are basically enterprise software systems that help digitize all medical records and billing information within a practice (patient history, past prescriptions, insurance information, etc.). There’s been a big push for hospitals and medical practices to digitize their records, because of the potential lowered costs due to higher efficiency, better workflows, and less prescription/billing errors. In light of this potential, the Obama administration has even offered a federal stimulus to all practices that adopt EMRs by 2016 as an incentive. So, there are numerous factors in place to bring about a big shift to universal adoption of electronic records within the medical industry. However, hospitals have been slow to adopt because of how fragmented and complicated the medical IT marketplace is, with over 200 vendors, little standardization of product features, and incredibly complex installation procedures. My team used this understanding to build a tool that helps medical doctors and practices pick which EMR product to install in their practice.
We realized that for the shift to EMRs happen, there needed to be an open, information-heavy marketplace that was consumer-friendly. The market right now is basically controlled by the vendors- price information is hard to find unless you sit through sales demos, it’s tough to get reviews unless you hire consultants, and it’s hard to find which EMRs even fit your practice in the first place. We built a tool called EMRfindr that brings all of this information together in one place, and lets medical practices find which EMR is best for them based on their own practice’s characteristics (how many doctors, medical specialty, preference for cloud/local computing, etc.). A lot of the value here is simply in the data we collected, bringing together comprehensive information from disparate sources and making it publicly available and searchable. This wealth of information in one source is especially valuable because the key stakeholders in this scenario are medical professionals making the IT investment decision. They just don’t have the time or resources, while running a medical practice, to deal with a complex IT search process.
You can click around the site to learn more about the topic, and to see some of the methodology we used for data collection and analysis.
We’re happy with the prototype we built in under a week, since it pretty easily demonstrates the clear value of such a tool. It would be cool if someone in the medical IT industry took note and attempted a similar project on a large scale with actual advanced data collection about different EMR vendors! For the EMR shift to happen, transparency needs to be the market norm.
*A good amount of time by a couple coding novices went into building that the last few days. My teammate Abhi coded the search engine, form, and results in SQL and PHP, while I did the design and wrote some HTML and basic CSS.
Not much to look at, but we’re pretty proud of our efforts making it in less than a week after extensive data collection! A new goal of mine is to get really good at web design.
