Health Information Search Tool

About

Invention Summary OpenInfo Button is a novel health information search tool, designed for online medical knowledge resource search.  Often, clinician’s patient care questions are unanswered.  Online knowledge resources are available that help clinicians answer these questions, yet, significant barriers limit the use of these resources within the clinical workflow.  Info buttons are decision support tools that use the clinical context (e.g., institution, user, patient) within the electronic health record (EHR) system to anticipate clinicians’ questions and provide automated links to relevant information. OpenInfo Button is a standards-based, open source Web service that was designed to disseminate infobutton capabilities in multiple EHR systems and healthcare organizations. OpenInfo Button is a reference implementation of the Health Level Seven (HL7) Infobutton Standard, which is required for EHR certification in the United States.  Medical staff and physicians would be the end users and small clinics with basic EMR/EHR systems or small EMR/EHR vendors would be target buyers. Value Proposition Convenient and specific clinic knowledge search Help EMR/EHR systems to meet core objectives of the Meaningful Use Act Provide evidence and guidelines for clinic decisions Provide knowledge and tools to generate patient specific education material Market Opportunity OpenInfo Button is designed to support clinical decisions.  A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) utilizes one or two items of patient data and uses medical logic modules to generate specific advice. In 2014, the entire CDSS market was $189 million in just North America alone, and it is expected to grow at a rate of 5.4%.  This shows that there is a large, growing market in this area.  In USA, there are 558,363 clinical offices and nursing facilities. The Allscript system, a competitor, holds nearly 9.5% of the EHR market and has its own Infobutton function. There are 237,500 medical facilities in the United States that would be possible customers for OpenInfo Button. Each implementation takes 4 hours to complete and may charge $540 per service. Given this, the total market could reach $128 million. Development Status The OpenInfo Button has been successfully implemented into various EHR systems, including Epic, VistA, HELP2, and Cerner. It has also been integrated with 38 knowledge resources and is in use at 5 large healthcare organizations.