The i.s.h.med® of today is light years away from the one that was developed in the mid-1990s – it has evolved into a global health care platform that provides full integration between clinical and operational workflows, courtesy of Cerner’s partnership with SAP.
It’s this partnership that is going to revolutionize health and care delivery over the next decade and beyond, as we proudly introduce i.s.h.med as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
Promoting the user experience
In the 1990s, devices performed a single purpose – phones made calls, computers gave access to limited information and medical devices purely did the job they were built for. While it marked progress at the time, people always want more – something to make their lives easier, and in the case of health care professionals, make the lives of their patients better too.
So, from device experience, the focus shifted to user experience – less ‘what can it do?’, and more ‘what can you get from it?’. Through the decades that followed, this has led us to phones that speak to computers, that speak to tablets, that speak to watches, that speak to all manner of things – the internet of things.
This is only possible through true interoperability, and the development of standards like HL7, FHIR and SNOMED, so they can speak the same language. But there’s no point being able to understand each other if they are kept siloed in separate systems, which brings us to the cloud – always there, always on, always available to deliver SaaS, and the home of our new platform.
How you will benefit
The next generation of i.s.h.med will merge the reliability of the existing platform, but supercharge it with new, smarter services – decision support, automation, machine learning – so that your hospitals can spend less time thinking about the technology and more about the patients. The patients themselves benefit, with up-to-date records meaning quicker and safer diagnoses and treatments.
For organizations, SAP integration ensures that the patients’ administration and management – including billing – is included in a single platform through end-to-end workflows, ensuring greater accuracy and efficiency.
A decade of evolution
Moving to our SaaS platform will not be happening overnight – it will progress gradually over the next decade, so that our valued users can acclimatize to the new system. During this time, elements of the cloud-based service will be introduced to augment the existing platform, before superseding it, resulting in a native cloud solution accessible any time and any place with an online connection.
Health care has come a long way in the past 20-30 years – wait till you see where it’s going to be in the future.
