NU 2016-133
Inventors
Curtis H. Weiss*
Luís A. Nunes Amaral
Heliodoro Tejedor Navarro
Meagan A. Bechel
Short Description
A HIPPA-compliant mobile application for improving patient care quality and optimizing implementation research.
Background
While mobile technologies have become essential in business and personal interactions, their adoption in the healthcare industry remains largely limited. Although significant technological advancements have been made in modern medical practice, advancements in data sharing and communication remain largely behind other sectors. There is a growing need for thoughtfully designed mobile applications to streamline health information sharing and track patient quality improvements. For example, a highly customizable mobile platform that enables end users, such as physicians or hospital adiminstrators, to rapidly share and access electronic health records, can transform the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Readily available patient data at point-of-care may help reduce medical errors and better informs health care providers for efficient decision-making. Additionally, health administrators and research scientists may find data points related to health quality improvements valuable for future health optimization studies.
Abstract
Northwestern researchers have developed a new HIPAA-compliant mobile application with highly customizable checklists designed to synchronize hospital work flows to ensure consistent information sharing and quality improvements within large health care organizations. While Electronic Medical Records (EMR) checklists currently exist in the market, none comprehensively provides seamless decision-making support, up-to-date result monitoring, and extensive customization capabilities. This novel mobile application implements a customizable checklist allowing end users define and track important metrics, such as patient safety standards. This application promotes more informed and efficient healthcare decision-making processes by driving rapid, safe and seamless health information exchange at point-of-care. Additionally, end users such as health care providers, administrators or researchers can securely define, sort and access specific relevant data through a highly customizable multi-user access mobile platform to observe processes or conduct health research studies. Importantly, the application offers both compatibility with various health record databases to extract health information as well as the capability to run in diverse enterprise environments.
Applications
Advantages
IP Status
A provisional application has been filed.