Good Health Informatics

Good Health Informatics

The health industry's commitment to best practice, regulatory compliance, and standardized care is built around the framework and guidelines established by the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH), widely known as "good clinical practice, good lab practice and good manufacturing practice." This was first applied in health research and now in the health ecosystem, which includes healthcare and public health. CTIS has coined the phrase Good Health Practice (GHP). CTIS believes that by placing available information of high integrity into the hands of patients, health professionals, and healthcare systems, GHP can be implemented, monitored, and measured throughout the health ecosystem in order to become a reality. CTIS defines this mechanism as Good Health Informatics™ (GHI).

GHI is built on the new discipline Health Informatics, which is an intersection of information science, computer science, and healthcare. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health Informatics includes not only information, but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, communication systems, process reengineering, total quality management, and organizational effectiveness. It is applied in the health ecosystem to clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, lab services, public health, occupational therapy, nursing, biomedical research, medical homes, home healthcare, and hospice organizations.

Central to GHI is CTIS’ Integrated Healthcare system Governance (IHG) mechanism. IHG represents the integration of business investment decision-making, monitoring mechanisms, organizational governance, informatics/technology governance, and community collaboration to achieve organizational business objectives with a high return on investment, and the best safety and quality of service for patients. IHG is built on integration of the systems, processes, and behaviors by which healthcare systems direct and control their functions by integrating in-system health professionals and system-wide assets, and the wider community of health professionals and health ecosystem partners.

For 25 years, CTIS has developed and implemented a proven framework of methodology and technologies that builds good health informatics solutions. The CTIS approach and philosophy to delivering services and developing solutions is derived from GHP. GHI meets international ethical and scientific quality standards in healthcare, health research, and public health conduct. Organizations involved in the health industry comply with these standards and provide strong public assurances that the rights, safety, and well-being of patients are protected and consistent with internationally-accepted ethical principles, treaties, and declarations.

CTIS’ proprietary framework is an extension to the Good Clinical Practice (GCP) standards to address the ethical and safety obligations inherent in the use of informatics. Our approach and tools, collectively referred to as GHI,  have been used to improve quality of care and patient access to care providers, reduce trial time by over 25%, and have provided an overall annual Return on Investment (ROI) of over 250% for our clients.

GHI’s central component is Good Clinical Informatics™ (GCI). GCI provides this exceptional ROI by building a threaded communication channel from beginning to end of the healthcare workflow and processes, which assists stakeholders in maximizing connectivity, coordination, and collaboration.

Proven GCI benefits include:

1. More efficient patient treatment plan

2. Better qualified clinicians and practitioners through timely and effective training

3. Optimized management of assets

4. Streamlined trial and care processes

5. Faster recruitment processes of physicians, sites, and patients

6. Better information intelligence, data management, and document management

7. Continuous monitoring, evaluation, and alignment of the study stages

8. Performance measurement of the evidence-based care

CTIS delivers the GCI framework through its TrialBridge™ intellectual property technology framework. GCI provides a robust research environment that delivers information through the support of infrastructure requirements, seamless integration with existing systems, and appropriate certifications and accreditations. Also included are libraries complete with reusable components, business intelligence capabilities, standardized processes, and a communications framework that enables the building of highly effective coalitions among stakeholders, on-demand target training, and facilitation of continuous information sharing.

GCI Component 1 - A Good Clinical Environment provides:

• Management of critical cost elements within the clinical environment, such as patient and site, as well as the leveraging of new technology and care and research management strategies to improve performance and expand participation to include untapped patient populations in care/research integration.

• Implementation of a robust information technology platform and infrastructure to meet proper certification and accreditation requirements that deliver data assurance and protection, ensuring emergency management and disaster recovery capabilities, and securing the privacy and confidentiality of study participant information.

• Facilitation of efficient electronic data capture, management, analysis, interchange, and reporting for all transactions that take place at each stage of the clinical care and trials lifecycle.

• Integration of data warehousing capabilities and enterprise applications to promote stringent information quality, reliability, predictability, scalability, interoperability, and harmonization across the care management and clinical trials management system.

GCI Component 2 - A Good Clinical Library provides:

• A global library of healthcare and research contents, configurable components, regulatory and service standards, data coding, and development methodologies.

• Standardized and proven development and management processes, together with domain and thought leadership expertise, to maximize the client’s ROI throughout the clinical care and trials process.

• Comprehensive business intelligence and knowledge management applications that deliver strategic decision support, digital dashboards, and data visualization to facilitate study alignment, evaluation of process compliance, and outcome analysis.

• Content and workflow mechanisms that deliver easy-to-use information customization, care requirement configurations, threading of care and research process and stages, and the facilitation of best practices throughout the lifecycle.

GCI Component 3 - Good Clinical Communication that provides:

• Continuous stakeholder connectivity, communication, and collaboration through the use of internet, networks, grids, and portals for document, data, and event management across the planning, treatment, conduct, monitoring, and completion stages of clinical care and research.

• On-demand training on clinical care and research processes, best practices, regulatory requirements, and treatment and study endpoint requirements for health industry stakeholders with the goal of increasing integration between research and care assets and resource capacity.

• Facilitation of and support for the formation of collaborative groups and networks to bring together diverse stakeholders, industry experts, and practitioners to share ideas and discoveries across the clinical research community.