Making the Vision of Capsule Endoscopy a Reality

Medtronic is a global leader in digital healthcare technology whose mission is to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. The company’s innovative technologies and therapies treat more than 70 health conditions and include transformative solutions like the PillCam™ ingestible endoscopy camera. These minimally invasive capsules provide clear images, helping gastroenterologists and other clinicians improve diagnosis, outcomes, and patient experiences. Over the past 20 years, PillCam has impacted the lives of more than 4 million patients around the world.

Medtronic uses InterSystems Health Connect™ to seamlessly connect its PillCam management application with disparate EHR, PACS, and RIS systems. The InterSystems solution makes it easy for Medtronic customers to exchange patient information and endoscopy images across dissimilar systems. The solution helps Medtronic reduce the data integration complexity of PillCam platform deployments.

The PillCam system includes a software application for managing and reviewing PillCam studies. PillCam Desktop is designed to integrate with other healthcare IT applications to streamline workflows and improve productivity. For example, PillCam Desktop can automatically retrieve patient and procedure information from an EHR system during check-in to save time and avoid data entry errors and other mishaps.

Exchanging patient information across healthcare IT systems is no easy matter. Different healthcare IT vendors and systems support different data standards, protocols, and formats. Integrating dissimilar systems can be a resource-intensive, time-consuming proposition. Medtronic needed to find a way to break down interoperability barriers, simplify integration efforts, and speed up PillCam system implementations.

After evaluating several options, Medtronic selected InterSystems Health Connect as the foundation of its PillCam EHR Connectivity System (PECS). Health Connect is an enterprise-grade data integration engine that helps Medtronic reduce integration cost and complexity, accelerate PillCam deployments, and meet stringent performance and availability requirements. The solution is engineered to seamlessly and reliably handle multiple forms of data at high speed and scale.

Health Connect includes pre-built data transformations for popular healthcare data formats and an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface that simplifies integration tasks. Medtronic uses Health Connect to efficiently connect PillCam Desktop with a variety of healthcare IT systems via HL7® v2 and DICOM, with future support planned for HL7 FHIR®. The solution helps the company expand market reach by supporting a wide array of EHR systems and other applications.

By streamlining interoperability, Health Connect also helps Medtronic accelerate the pace of innovation and speed up time-to-market for new products like the groundbreaking PillCam Genius SB capsule, which clinically appropriate patients can ingest at home during a telehealth visit, for ultimate convenience and flexibility.

Health Connect helped Medtronic boost business results and make its vision of capsule endoscopy a reality. The comprehensive InterSystems solution helps the global healthcare technology leader:

• Improve product margins by reducing data integration cost and complexity
• Accelerate revenues by speeding up customer deployments
• Expand sales opportunities by supporting a wide range of EHR, PACS, and RIS systems
• Improve competitive differentiation by accelerating time-to-market for new products
• Increase customer satisfaction by eliminating interoperability barriers and providing predictable and reliable data interworking
• Protect and extend investments by supporting future plans like FHIR integrations