Overview

Business Opportunities (i.e Corporate Alliances/Partnerships)

Ocean Informatics is working with medical software vendors and health organisations in the UK and Europe. The company is developing business projects with partners interested in executing projects and products that provide a solution using our components and tools. These partnerships extend to distribution arrangements for the health informatics industry. Ocean currently has an office in London and staff providing consulting services and solutions around our products, including archetype and template methodologies.

Technology/Products and Services Description

Ocean offers products and consulting services in three main areas:

• Electronic Health Record Repository tools and services
  OceanEHR is a secure, high-performance health record computing framework, incorporating EHR, EHR Extracts, Demographics and Terminology access. It is based on openEHR Release 1.0.1 and is fully archetype- and template-enabled. No software or database changes are needed when clinical content definitions change. It includes tools for application development that guarantee the semantic coherence from GUI to database.
• Clinical Modelling Tools and services
  Archetypes, templates and terminology subsets are the semantic cornerstone of an e-Health environment, whether it beis a whole country, a region or a single provider. They provide the means to define the semantics of all clinical information in a standardised, portable and computable way and are used to 'future-proof' operational systems against ongoing change in information requirements.
• Ocean Knowledge Management Repository
  The Ocean Knowledge Manager (OKM) is a system for collaborative development, managing and publishing of clinical knowledge resources, enabling the implementation of knowledge governance in the health enterprise. It manages archetypes, templates and related resources, including enterprise resources and meta-data relating to clinical models, under an ontological classification system.

Competitive Advantages

The Economics of Archetypes

As a semantic basis for e-health information management, archetypes offer significantly reduced costs while providing much higher information quality across the healthcare enterprise than existing methods. In health content modelling, they greatly reduce duplication of effort while allowing terminology bindings to be developed gradually. They also offer a means of directly implementing existing data-sets. As archetypes and the dependent artefacts are fully formal, they further reduce costs in the deployment environment, since they are directly consumable by tools, requiring no further programming or interpretation.

The growing size and quality of the international openEHR repository of archetypes means that individual organisations using the technology have to do less work to be interoperable, while gaining access to the content models created and used by some of the largest health organisations in the world, including the Australian government and the UK NHS.

Integrating the Health Environment

Through OceanEHR’s use of archetypes and templates to enable existing information to be safely imported, semantically marked and exported, OceanEHR relieves the enterprise of the cost and problems of ad hoc data integration and standards compliance. Integration within and across enterprises allows the economic and health benefits of true patient-centric EHRs to be realised, including integrated care pathway (ICP) management and decision support.

Using archetypes and templates also mean the back-end software and databases rarely have to be modified, reducing redeployment and testing costs. Compare this to current environments which either fail to keep up with requirements, or undergo continual costly redeployment.

OceanEHR provides a truly vendor-independent common back-end for healthcare delivery organisations, allowing them greater control over the introduction of applications and specialist systems. It can be used by vendors via the published interfaces, relieving them of the need to develop their own health record persistence.

Realise the Value of E-Health Investment

With a common semantic infrastructure throughout the application stack and across systems, health content is decoupled from the specifics of setting, application and provider site. This vastly increases the value of captured information, since now it can be continually re-used in long-term shared care, by decision support and for medical research.

The potential outcomes include improved chronic disease management; better cost control due to personalised health care; detection of patient risks leading to prevention, and greatly improved evidence-based medicine.

Website address: www.oceaninformatics.com