“The modern healthcare team is awash in disconnected data,” said Dr. Shane McNamee, chief medical information officer, Global Health & Financial Solutions sector. “As a result of this lack of situational awareness, physicians fail to catch patient health risks until it is too late.”
McNamee, a physician specializing in combat wounds who previously served as the clinical lead for the Department of Veteran Affairs’ Enterprise Health Management Platform, has seen first-hand the complications that arise when patients undergo care across facilities. With health data spread across various systems, it is difficult to consolidate information for a holistic treatment plan.
McNamee, along with Bo Dagnall, the sector’s chief technology officer, and Dr. Colin Chinn, the sector’s chief medical officer, have come up with a solution.
HealthConcourse is an intelligent data as a service (iDaaS), hybrid cloud solution that offers healthcare interoperability. The Peraton team built a prototype for the Defense Health Agency (DHA) under a one-year contract originally awarded in October 2020.
“Peraton’s HealthConcourse prototype demonstrates that we can configure electronic health records to operate like an air traffic control system,” said Dagnall. “Our digital health platform connects healthcare workers, patients, medical services, and data faster, better, and cheaper, plus it is vendor-agnostic so that it is accessible to all.”
HealthConcourse operates under an events-driven architecture which automatically updates information across systems. Healthcare workers no longer must act as “information mules”—McNamee’s term to describe the data gathering that doctors must do across IT applications in order to analyze a patient’s medical history.
The platform is scalable, flexible, cloud-based, and based on enterprise open-source technology. Thanks to automatic updates and information consolidation, doctors can detect emerging risks faster and with greater accuracy.
“HealthConcourse is not a shrink-wrapped solution, but rather a framework with a collection of preexisting tools,” said Dagnall. “In future, we may have enough data analytics from HealthConcourse users that we can identify common patterns and create a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product.”
Since Peraton’s recent acquisitions have led to an expansion of resources, the Peraton team plans to continue honing the HealthConcourse technology.
“This is an ecosystem problem and not a challenge that is unique to any one customer,” said McNamee. “The promise of automating and delivering cutting-edge technology into clinical workflows excites me. As of now, it still takes up to 17 years for new best practices to propagate across the healthcare system. The quality and cost impacts of this reality are simply no longer tenable.”
HealthConcourse’s innovative technology is reshaping the art of the possible using machine automation inside cloud agnostic containers, freeing healthcare data from siloes and creating care without boundaries.
