Duke Medicine And IBM Are Making Patience Information Easier To Access

ARMONK, NY & DURHAM, NC - Duke Medicine has teamed with IBM to develop and launch a single, unified health portal site where patients can securely and easily access data and services, including personal health profiles; clinical content; account billing and insurance information.

Typically, health systems have multiple sites to conduct patient and clinical communications such as patient billing services or information for referring physicians. Now, by using a service oriented architecture (SOA) based on IBM software and services to connect information from disparate systems, the Duke HealthView allows patients and eventually physicians to access and manage health information and services more efficiently and effectively from one single site.

“In order to build deeper relationships with our patients, we needed a unified communication tool that would bring together different data for a holistic view,” said Asif Ahmad, VP Diagnostic Services and CIO Duke University Health System and Duke University Medical Center. “Through the HealthView Portal, IBM is helping Duke Medicine improve patient satisfaction and safety by giving patients and clinicians the information they need to work together for better health outcomes.”

IBM designed and built the HealthView Portal with a single user authentication to give Duke patients the capability to easily and securely retrieve a variety of health-related information. For example, patients can request and book medical appointments; view and manage account information; pay bills; maintain personal health and insurance information.

Also, as part of the health portal implementation, Express and Kiosk Check-in are planned to give patients the ability to complete registration and clinical forms online prior to an appointment to save time and help shorten in-clinic wait times. Additionally, with the HealthView Portal, patients will have the means to personalize health news and disease management information; connect to online support groups; obtain pre-operative preparation information; schedule remote medical consultations and participate in clinical trials recruitment and enrollment.

Physicians and referring clinicians will also be able to securely utilize the HealthView Portal in the near future for a variety of information including patient medical history and health data; lab results; medication lists and medical reference materials. The portal will also help physicians book appointments for patients, as well as operating suites, and allow for consultations with other Duke medical specialists.

“Innovative customers like Duke Medicine are utilizing technology to build a secure foundation for patient centric care,” said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Global Healthcare and Life Sciences. “By working together, IBM and Duke have been able to implement one online resource so patients and clinicians can be better connected through information and services.”

The Duke HealthView Portal utilizes an open standards framework, based on SOA principles, designed to give healthcare providers, healthcare benefit organizations, public health and pharmaceutical companies the flexibility to integrate and manage clinical and administrative business applications independently of the underlying computing platform.

SOA provides the foundation to connect and organize business processes from disparate clinical information systems and allow secure access to comprehensive patient information anytime, anywhere via the Internet. Based on work with partners and customers, integration capabilities and partnering programs enable interoperability of applications, services and their supporting processes.

Also included in the Duke HealthView Portal solution are IBM WebSphere® Portal with healthcare specific web services and IBM System p™. IBM WebSphere Portal helps enterprises quickly build scalable role based portals that simplify and accelerate user access to personalized information, applications, processes and people to maximize organizational productivity and operational efficiency. In addition, IBM Workplace Forms, Web Content Manager, Rational and Tivoli software are included to help create an extensible platform for additional patient centric services.