AEGIS.net: When Health IT Systems Talk to Each Other, Patient Safety Improves

It’s Tuesday morning in the ICU of a mid-size regional hospital where a doctor is treating a patient for a blood infection. The patient had been admitted with the same condition and successfully treated earlier in another hospital. The doctor tells the family that he is trying a few different antibiotics while waiting for lab results to identify the specific bacteria that’s involved. The family asks, “What about the records from last time—can’t you get those from the other hospital?” The doctor says, “We can put in the request, then we’ll have to wait for the fax to come through.”

One of the most pressing challenges facing healthcare IT community today is interoperability; that is, safely and accurately sharing patient data, when appropriate. Major hospital systems frequently share patient information by fax machine.“The status quo is not good enough. We need to bring the technology closer to the patient where it really matters,” says Mario Hyland, Senior Vice President and Founder, AEGIS.net. He is on a mission to bring true interoperability of electronic health information into common practice.

Interoperability among systems depends upon standards. It’s critical that the systems that want to share information conform to the standards otherwise they can’t understand each other. Assuring interoperability and conformance depends in turn upon effective testing. “A big problem we see today is that too often testing for interoperability is limited to what we call ‘happy path’ t esting,” says Mario. “ Even worse, testing is usually considered ‘one and done,’ meaning if a system successfully tests interoperable today, it’s considered interoperable tomorrow. That is a reckless assumption,” he adds. This points to a need for testing that takes into consideration such an ecosystem and offers the means to test under scenarios that simulate real world environments.

Recognizing the need, AEGIS.net designed and built the Developers Integration Lab (DIL). Currently in its third release, the DIL provides a cloud-based, Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) model that’s always available for developers, implementers, and even certification bodies to use for testing interoperability. The DIL is the only testing solution that performs conformance testing at the level of overall message, discrete message element, message segment, and complete end-to-end message exchanges.