The Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service (CHARTSaaS)© is an Internet cloud-based software development environment (SDE), a.k.a. “software toolkit,” that enables healthcare provider subject matter experts (SMEs) to design, develop, deploy, operate and optimize information technology (IT) applications, a.k.a. “apps,” for continuous cognitive support with minimal cost or need for IT staff and system resource. Apps created with the CHARTSaaS© SDE can operate continuously (24X7X365) for complex event monitoring, rules-based spontaneous action such as staff notification, and similarity and predictive analytics for population-based medicine. Apps created using the CHARTSaaS© SDE minimize cognitive overload, which is the root cause of medical mistakes — the third-leading cause of patient deaths in the USA after cancer and heart disease.
“It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their ‘civilian’ life.
Even as consumer IT — word-processing programs, search engines, social networks, e-mail systems, mobile phones and apps, music players, gaming platforms — has become deeply integrated into the fabric of modern life, physicians find themselves locked into pre–Internet-era electronic health records (EHRs) that aspire to provide complete and specialized environments for diverse tasks. The federal push for health IT, spearheaded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), establishes an information backbone for accountable care, patient safety, and health care reform. But we now need to take the next step: fitting EHRs into a dynamic, state-of-the-art, rapidly evolving information infrastructure — rather than jamming all health care processes and workflows into constrained EHR operating environments …
The IT foundation required for health care is the core set of health data types, the formalization of health care workflows, and encoded knowledge (e.g., practice guidelines, decision-support tools, and care plans). With those ingredients, existing free and flexible software can support the automation of biomedical processes. Many businesses have adopted large-scale, transindustry platforms to support customer relations, Web applications, and secure cloud-based data storage. Health care is ripe for this approach.
Health IT vendors should adapt modern technologies wherever possible. Clinicians choosing products in order to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs should not be held hostage to EHRs that reduce their efficiency and strangle innovation. New companies will offer bundled, best-of-breed, interoperable, substitutable technologies — several of which are being developed with ONC funding — that can be optimized for use in health care improvement. Properly nurtured, these products will rapidly reach the market, effectively addressing the goals of “meaningful use,” signaling the post-EHR era, and returning to the innovative spirit of EHR pioneers.”