Mission and Scope

What problem does this project address?

Family medicine is undergoing considerable reform as the process of care delivery is essentially unchanged, despite great leaps in medical knowledge and complexity of care. There is increased pressure to renew full service care and provide more effective, full service primary care. IT is seen as one of the enabling tools to ensure that care can be delivered more effectively.

 

Despite considerable resources being leveraged to encourage physicians to adopt electronic medical records, adopt is still low and many physicians are concerned about the change required in practice to implement an EMR. The TAPAS framework is envisioned as a suite of tools that a practice can select options from to test the waters of clinical information systems and learn the skills around changing practice

 

This project provides a framework for physicians to adopt a limited amount of technology to assist their practice in a focused area. This will provide a low risk pathway for physicians to become accustomed to technology, accelerating the adoption of technology to improve care.

 

 

 

 

 

What is the goal of this project?

To provide the basis of the Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite (TAPAS) framework. This would consist of an open source core "virtual practice network server" that would house patient summaries. This is a web based server that can be accessed by physicians in their officess and while on call. Further, secure connectivity to PDAs will be provided.

 

The server will be shared amongst a group of care providers (ie network) allowing them to appropriately share information. It in seen that the server can house electronic medical summaries for all patients cared for by physicians within an office (ie practice network) or within a call group (ie virtual practice network). This server will have tools to support the input and management of data for patients. For example, a prescription management system will support prescriptions.

 

The system will be developed as a collection of components that can be shared. For example, the connection of the medical summaries to a PDA will be available as a standards based, stand alone, open source component that could be integrated into an EMR product.

The goal of this project is not to build an EMR. Rather, it is building a framework that can be extended to allow physicians to use technology to assist specific aspects of care delivery. In the case of this project, the first iteration of the TAPAS project will develop a core framework, based on work of the BC electronic medical summary group and extend it by providing a conduit and applications to communicate between members of a call group and to access (ie view) medical summaries of patients in the call group on a PDA. While on call physicians have no access to patient information on the patients that they are caring for. This is seen as a significant "value add" to the work already being completed by other groups in BC and will be offered, through an open source license, to EMR vendors.

 

 

What is the scope of this project?

To develop an extenisble platform and product for the eMS that connects to the PDA. Provide a robust patient model built on the HL-7 RIM that will allow the addition of other components (Clinical Applications) to be added, such as tools for diabetes management, etc (although those are currently out of scope of this project). The Clinical Applications in this phase that are in scope include:

 

• Medical Summary (core patient model and interfaces to manage the summary)
• messaging (two types: provider to provider and Patient Condition Flags)
• Prescription Management
• Consultation module (ability to generate a consultation / referral request that can be sent via the eMS broker or printed on paper)
• connectivity to the EGADSS clinical decision support server to provide patient specific preventive reminders.
  

 

What development methodology is being used?

See our software development methodology document.

Where should a new team member start?

For more information, see the project proposal.