Have you ever been given a toy but told not to play with it? It’s like giving someone a toy airplane but not allowing them to fly it. What’s the point? For some time, MC4 users haven’t been able to use a bidirectional interface capability due to some data encryption issues.
We’ve been impatiently waiting to fully enable the MedWeb bidirectional interface with TC2, a digital imaging solution that will assist radiologists in identifying, interpreting, reporting, storing and transporting digital medical images. The capability has been in the field for a while, but now the long wait is over and we’re telling medical units in the field, it’s time to open up MedWeb and fully enable the bidirectional capabilities that allow users to map images to a patient’s inpatient medical record.
The Defense Health Information Management System (DHIMS) released MedWeb, which was added to TC2, the inpatient application on MC4 systems. The digital imaging solution is being turned on at a number of deployed medical treatment facilities (MTFs). It is operational at Camp Dwyer, Afghanistan and Craig Joint Theater Hospital in Bagram and we’re currently working with the Salerno to completely enable the capability. Once we have permission to install TC2 at Bastion, we will enable the MedWeb capability there also.
Until now, patient demographic data and other information have been manually entered into TC2 and MedWeb. As with anything that requires manual entry, there’s the risk of human error. Invalid patient demographics could be entered or images could be filed under the wrong patient. By fully enabling MedWeb, we will help increase patient safety.
With MedWeb, a radiologist can read and interpret the image and report their findings in TC2 or MedWeb. The interface will allow TC2 and MedWeb to communicate with each other so information only has to be entered once. This eliminates duplicative data entry and reduces the chance of having data corrupted by using a more tedious and labor-intensive dual entry system.
By the way, we’re 66 percent complete in fielding EMR 2.1.3.1. Some areas are further ahead than others, but we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few weeks. MC4 EMR 2.1.4.0 is already under development to bring additional capabilities and fixes.