Swiss clinic group implements MPI from ICW

Swiss private clinic group, Hirsladen, has installed a master patient index system supplied by German e-health specialist InterComponentWare.

The master patient index (MPI) system will support the integration of heterogeneous hospital systems used in the 13 private clinics and 100 centres of excellence and specialised institutes of the Hirslanden group.

The Hirslanden clinics already use modern IT systems to store the medical information of their patients. However, up to now, the information could only be used by the clinic where it was stored.

“Hirslanden is the first clinic group in Switzerland to use a master patient index”, said Magnus Oetiker, Hirslanden’s hospital services manager. “We chose the ICW Professional Suite, not only because it can improve the quality of our master data and support our framework, but also because it offers solutions for the exchange of medical information that can even support the implementation of the national e-health strategy."

The InterComponentWare (ICW) supplied MPI, part of its Professional Suite, will enable the Hirslanden clinics to establish a foundation for the reliable and secure exchange of medical information between their various hospitals and clinics.

The MPI aligns the master data from the various systems of the clinic group and, if they match, assigns it to a particular patient. This allows medical information to be consolidated in a virtual patient record that can be used by all facilities and that includes all treatments of a patient in any of the Hirslanden clinics.

According to ICW its MPI doesn’t require the replacement of any existing systems and offers extremely high performance; tests have shown that it is able to provide stable response times of less than one second, even with 100 million patient data records and queries of up to 1,000 concurrent users.

ICW says these reported levels of performance means the system can also be used for larger patient populations, including the implementation of the national Swiss e-health Strategy.

Martin Fuchs, CEO of InterComponentWare Switzerland, adds: “I am pleased that our master patient index, which is already being used in Germany and the US, will now also be used in Switzerland. This shows that our e-health solutions can easily be adjusted to the special requirements of a country’s health system and can thereby help improve the quality of medical information."