We recently caught up with Itransition, a global software engineering company based in Decatur, Georgia, to learn more about some recent projects and initiatives around the use of digital in healthcare.
We were joined by representatives of Itransition including Andrey Korzun, head of Healthcare Centre of Excellence; Anastasiya Korzun, healthcare solution consultant; and Marina Detinko, head of marketing.
Marina briefly introduced the company, saying that Itransition has been in business for 26 years, after originally being founded in 1998 as an engineering company, before moving into the healthcare space with Itransition’s Healthcare Centre of Excellence dedicated to harnessing the power of digital in health and care.
“We now have around 3,000 people, more than 800 customers from scores of business verticals, and the decision to start the Centres of Excellence programme was based on our track record of working with customers in the healthcare domain. We’re a truly global company, with a work-from-anywhere concept, but we have physical locations in more than 15 countries.”
Andrey offered some insight from his perspective, adding that Itransition helps to improve efficiency and “achieve tangible results for medical device technology and software producers”, consulting with health information solutions providers and pharma on business intelligence, machine learning, AI, and data science.
“We work with companies of all sizes, from small start-ups to industry giants,” Andrey continued, “and our Healthcare Center of Excellence allows us to focus on studying and implementing healthcare-specific business processes, proof of concepts, standards and technologies. Our R&D programme ensures evaluation, adaptation and innovation across all new approaches and standards in healthcare. And we also help healthcare organisations assess the technical feasibility of ideas, and to find suitable tech for implementation.”
Medical device and telehealth projects
Andrey moved on to tell us a little bit about some of the medical device and telehealth projects that Itransition has been working on, including one such project with Nuvara, a US-based medical device start-up that decided to “optimise the process surrounding Code Blue events”.
Itransition delivered “a multi-tenant, unified and HIPAA compliant solution”, which worked like “smart carts”, including specific components for Code Blue event management, offering “enhanced quality around reporting and inventory management, and instant EHR integration”.
The solution has “a great impact on clinical practices, enabling nurses to provide better care during life-threatening events, guiding them through procedures according to protocol, and letting them focus on care”. It also means that procedures are properly documented and recorded, making it possible to “check if everything was done according to the protocol” at a later date.
Another project that Andrey shared with us was Sapiocare EHR, developed for Triptych Technologies, Inc., which had a contract with “several networks of clinics, and decided to develop medical software capabilities focused on maximising the recording, storage and archiving of patient care information, with as little additional work for doctors or practitioners as possible”.
To meet these requirements, Itransition collaborated with physicians and healthcare providers to come up with a solution that “optimises all of the complex workflows of medical practices with building telemedicine functionality, as well as developing a user-centred interface with natural language processing capabilities enabling speech/voice recognition”.
“We also integrated an automated system for handwriting recognition, which uses ‘smart pens’ that allow doctors to fill in initial encounter forms on regular paper, with all of the handwriting instantly scanned and sent back to EHRs.”
A third project involved a clinical text analysis using Apache cTAKES™, where “the system recognises medical terms and helps to automatically create drafts of important medical notes, like diagnoses, medications, and charts, to simplify and speed up data processing”.
Finally, Itransition worked on a solution for processing data for Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, “a company which manufactures devices for automated blood collection, blood processing, and segmentation”, which was capable of “tracking the flow of the blood from collection to blood bank, and through different steps such as extraction and moving into blood bags, etc.” The process was automated, and the solution was also integrated with EHRs and a range of medical software, to ensure compliance with standards, and to minimise manual data entry and associated potential for errors.
Precision medicine and business process management
As well as solutions for telehealth and medical devices, Itransition also developed a HIPAA-compliant decision support solution for a US-based provider of health information solutions for oncologists.
Sharing a little more on this, Anastasiya told us that the team “delivered a platform streamlining their collection of oncology treatment information from medical research, treatment order creation, and generation of reports for recommended therapies”.
Capable of collecting medical data to make treatment suggestions and allowing for the automatic or manual setup of therapy rules based on the research, the platform is also equipped with custom templates to streamline report generation.
“The precision medicine portal automates order creation, helps coordinate doctors, medical labs, patients, insurance, and more, to support evidence-based therapy. The solution is integrated with EHR and serves laboratory and insurance service providers, helping doctors to access the information they require to provide better treatment plans.”
Anastasiya says that the solution has received “really good feedback” from the customer, and that “90% of doctors accept that the automatically generated recommendations work great”, being used by 700+ employees across more than 30 medical institutions with 1,000 therapy orders created each month.
Another project has seen the team working on a healthcare business process management solution for a UK-based agency specialising in care home facilities and providing recovery-focused care for patients with a primary mental health diagnosis.
“Their idea was to build a healthcare business process management system for process automation. Our system allows the managing and analysing of medical intake and collects statistics on treatment dynamics per patient, and that information is used to select and recommend specific treatments.”
By using a web application, staff within the care homes were able to effectively manage their tasks and performance, with capabilities including monitoring, tracking, analysing, and reporting.
“It covers two main use cases in the industry: managing patient-related and general tasks when doctors need to assign tasks during care plan creation; and incident reporting, where once an incident is reported, the system triggers the creation of an event and associated tasks based on predefined templates.”
Each of the tasks “has a due date set in accordance with applicable laws”, and this is “already managed within the solution, so care providers don’t need to spend lots of time investigating the laws and aligning their workflow with them, because the solution will prompt necessary actions automatically”.
Next steps for the solution will include building a module to allow the tracking of patient progress and making data-driven decisions on patient treatment, Anastasiya continued, “and it’s important to mention that introducing the first module has already resulted in a two-times cost reduction at our client’s care homes”.
Looking ahead
Marina shared with us some thoughts about where Itransition would like to go next, what kinds of projects they would hope to work on within the healthcare space, and their overarching ambitions for the next 12 months and beyond.
“Even in countries which are considered advanced in terms of health tech, there are still areas not covered by healthcare IT, and as a global company our ambition is to make the world a better place. We have customers in more than 40 countries, and a big part of making that improvement would be to establish a digital framework and help them to do so as well, to make healthcare everywhere accessible and high quality.”
The team has already started to work toward this goal, Marina told us, and “we clearly see that our customers, who are very reputable healthcare organisations, are looking in the same direction, which helps us believe that our goal is achievable”.
We’d like to thank the team from Itransition for their time, and for sharing their insight with us.
To learn more about Itransition’s work on healthcare software development solutions and services, please click here.
- 1
- 2
