Solutions | IQPlatform™ — Intelligent Mobile Platform
IQPlatform™ is an Intelligent Enterprise Mobile Platform™ that facilitates the interaction of healthcare information, including clinical results, between disparate legacy systems and mobile caregivers at the point of care in virtually real time. IQPlatform™ enables caregivers to interact with information critical to rendering treatment and add and modify information, all at the point of care resulting in improved quality of care delivered efficiently and effectively. IQMax’s proprietary technology consists of IQPlatform™, the healthcare patient platform, and various IQMax healthcare specific applications such as IQSpeak for mobile dictation, IQCharge for mobile charge capture, and IQRounds for mobile clinical results.
Intelligent Mobile Applications
The mobile marketplace continues to develop a variety of applications aimed at better equipping the medical professional for today’s challenges. These applications range from specialty type diagnostic applications to simple schedule applications. These applications are developed by a broad range of providers ranging from small pure play mobile vendors to large HIT providers.
However, a platform that allows applications to operate cohesively in a typical healthcare scenario does not exist in the market. Consequently, IQPlatform™ is unique. The term “enterprise platform” refers to the characteristics and features of the platform that allow it to operate in a wide range of settings from the demanding environment of acute care to clinics.
Access to the Information You Need When You Need it.
IQMax’s platform for handheld computers such as PDAs and Smartphones enables it to become an efficient, secure, scalable, extendable, dependable and deployable technology. This platform enables critical historical and current patient information (detailed demographics, allergies, labs, vitals, microbiology, pathology, radiology, transcribed reports, etc.) to be delivered in a mobile environment at the point of care. Once this information is delivered, caregivers can engage the patient at bedside and take action (capture charges, dictate, check a formulary, write a prescription, order labs, etc.) that significantly improves caregiver workflow and ultimately, patient care.
Leveraging existing PDAs and Smartphones utilizing the Pocket PC (Microsoft) or Palm Pilot operating systems with voice recorder functionality and removable memory, IQMax has created the premier handheld business solution for the healthcare professional. Physicians and healthcare professionals can perform advanced clinical functions on the PDA previously only available in a desktop environment.
Intelligent Mobile Platform
IQPlatform™ was designed and built from the ground up by IQMax to be the foundation layer of its software products. This layer is overlaid with common consumer hardware and software transforming an everyday handheld device into a sophisticated business tool. IQPlatform™ is comprised of three subparts consisting of an “on-device” platform, synchronization engine, and server technology.
On-Device Platform
IQPlatform™ supports multiple mobile operating systems including Palm OS and Pocket PC OS and works with PDAs and Smartphones. It is also cross platform independent allowing the user to instantly switch between Palm OS and Pocket PC while having the same information, look, and feel. Approximately 40 handhelds and Smartphone devices have been certified for use with IQPlatform™. Future devices may be supported by platform enhancements, thus minimizing maintenance requirements to the applications residing on the platform.
Due to the limitations of consumer devices, Management has chosen to standardize with multimedia memory cards or SD/MMC card technology as part of IQMax’s on-device platform. The SD/MMC card technology resides in most microelectronics as a storage or multimedia device. IQMax has bundled its proprietary database and applications to use this multimedia to prevent loss of data and loss of applications. This is a key component of a reliable, scalable, and deployable platform. This platform component practically eliminates data loss and application data corruption by storing data directly to the SD/MMC cards and incorporating built-in IQPlatform recovery features.
The “self healing” software automatically recovers and installs without any loss of data. Furthermore, if the handheld unit is damaged, the card can be inserted into another unit. The same feature takes over and the user is up and running in a matter of seconds. This saves the user and service technician valuable time. The ability to prevent loss of information is critical in healthcare and is only offered by IQMax. Once applications are delivered, IQMax’s “plug-in” software architecture allows multiple, potentially unrelated, applications on a device to scale into a suite of applications.
Synchronization Engine
IQMax’s IQExchange sync engine employs a multi-threaded hybrid distributed sync architecture offering both “smart-push” and “smart-pull” modes of data exchange. Designed in a “plug-in” methodology, this offers, via the synchronization engine, the ability to virtually scale at each integral level from PDA to server. The architectural design enables IQMax to utilize both servers and workstations efficiently during the synchronization process. In the “smart-push” mode, IQPlatform™ is intelligent and can anticipate where the likely sync location will occur and then push over the latest information in anticipation of a sync occurring.
To compliment the above, the “smart-pull” will update information during the sync from the server to confirm that it has the latest information. Again, this provides the user with significantly faster sync times and limited waiting. The system incorporates the ability to sync anytime, anywhere or anyplace. Syncing hospital information at clinics or clinic information at their homes allows physicians to retrieve, move, use and interact with updated information to render the best patient care regardless of location.
Server Technology
The IQMax server technology can be delivered in a hosted environment using either an ASP (IQAnywhere™) or premise-based (IQEnterprise™) system. All IQMax application and platform software components targeting servers, workstations, and mobile devices are deployed remotely via the web utilizing software deployment technologies built into IQPlatform™. Each core component has been built with a “plug-in” design methodology. An integral part of the server technology is the interface engine that allows data integration between multiple disparate systems and the IQPlatform™ server. Utilizing various interfaces, IQMax has integrated into over 40 back-end systems, including large-scale systems, for such companies as McKesson, Siemens, EPIC, Cerner, IDX, Misys, NextGen, Emdeon, and Spheris, among others.
The core interface engine on which the healthcare platform is built on top utilizes a multi-threaded plug-in architecture that allows interfaces to be plugged into the system connecting multiple disparate foreign systems to a system regardless of application, data type, operation, etc. The core interface engine provides transportation (getting the data from one point to another), transformation (converting data from source structures to destination structures), and translation (converting data from a foreign system's vocabulary to a common vocabulary or to another foreign system's vocabulary).
Acute and Ambulatory Care Environments
IQEnterprise™ is a premise-based system that allows the customer to host the entire IQPlatform™ and applications on site. This model is focused on delivering overall value to mid-sized and large clients. It also allows mid-sized to large integrated delivery networks (“IDN”) to act as an ASP and to host the IQMax applications for its network.
IQAnywhere™ is hosted at a state-of-the-art center and allows small- to mid-sized clients to have IQMax applications served to them via an ASP model. IQEnterprise™ and IQAnywhere™, built on IQPlatform™, can easily be remotely deployed and managed.