Partners HealthCare has plans to develop an add-on to its electronic medical record system, partnering with India-based Persistent Systems to develop software that will help its doctors.
The four-year partnership will have Partners clinicians and researchers working with Persistent engineers to develop software. The software will draw data from the electronic medical record, allowing physicians to search the EMR for similar kinds of patients to see how other patients were effectively treated and to ultimately deliver better care.
Groups also envision that the tool would have drug interaction data within it so doctors won’t have to exit the EMR to look up which drugs might work best.
Partners did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
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“The goal of this platform is to deliver information that doctors, nurses or other staff can use in their day-to-day clinical care activities,” said Rahul Patel, executive vice president of digital at Persistent. “It’s about providing data access to all these individuals.”
Persistent is headquartered in India, with offices in Nashua, New Hampshire; Littleton, Massachusetts; Philadelphia; Santa Clara, California; and Bellevue, Washington.
The platform which is being formed from an undisclosed investment from both institutions, is envisioned as an open-source platform, so that anyone can innovate within the database.
Similar platforms are currently available on other electronic medical records — namely athenahealth’s Epocrates drug database app.
Patel acknowledged that the platform isn’t the first to solve these problems, but said Partners hasn’t been able to utilize what’s on the market. He said the solution also wouldn’t be just for Partners, but is envisioned to ultimately be marketed to other hospitals to help doctors work more efficiently.
“We’d like to take that open source we create and provide our own hosted solutions that we will charge fees for institutions to use,” Patel said.
Date:April 25, 2017