PITTSBURGH – The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has announced a sweeping interoperability initiative that it believes will fundamentally change the way its clinicians deliver quality patient care.

According to UPMC chief information officer Dan Drawbaugh, the $84 million initiative will not only integrate data from disparate IT systems within the network’s 19 hospitals and 400 ambulatory care sites, but also will enable regional information exchange with other healthcare providers in western Pennsylvania.

Of the total project spend, more than $35 million has been allocated for software licensing and a new development partnership with interoperability vendor dbMotion.

Drawbaugh said the initiative was critical to UPMC’s ongoing efforts to develop a world-class healthcare IT infrastructure. In the last five years, the system has spent $1 billion on IT, standardizing on department solutions such as radiology and pathology, upgrading ERP and revenue cycle management systems, and selecting key vendors for point-of-care systems and specialties.

“As this effort has evolved, we began to see a need – and a requirement – of interoperability and integration beyond what we would be able to achieve through standard HL7 interfaces,” he said. “It is something we absolutely want to be doing and something we feel is essential to our mission.”

The initiative will utilize dbMotion’s Service Oriented Architecture integration platform to develop services that will enable disparate systems to produce for – or consume data from – other systems.

When the platform is rolled out, “two systems that were not cognizant of each other when they were built will be able to communicate with each other,” said UPMC’s Jay Srini, vice president of emerging technologies. “You will have disparate data sources, but a homogenous view.”

“This will glue systems together,” agreed dbMotion CEO Yuval Ofek, “ to create a true one-patient, one record environment.”

The killer application for the system appears to be developing advanced clinical support tools for the enterprise, although UPMC’s vision clearly extends beyond that opportunity. Drawbaugh noted that the best decision support rules “ought to be of concern to patients” if they are operating on only a subset of a person’s health data.

“Providing the longitudinal record and decision support rules, no matter where the data exist, in an interface that the clinician is most comfortable using” is the point, Srini said.

Beyond developing the advanced clinical decision support system, the dbMotion platform will also enable UPMC’s 250-member development team to create specialty solutions that are currently not served by the commercial vendor community. Srini also said that since UPMC holds better than a 50 percent share of the healthcare market in Allegheny County and the surrounding environs, the system is likely to serve as the engine for the regional health information network.

As part of the agreement, UPMC and dbMotion will create a multimillion dollar joint development fund to create novel interoperability solutions for the healthcare industry. UPMC has created similar joint development agreements with industry leaders IBM and Cerner.

The deal represents the first major U.S. win for dbMotion, an Israeli company that entered the North American market less than two years ago. The company’s technology is widely deployed in Israel and first implemented in 2001 throughout Clalit Health Services, one of the world’s largest HMOs with 14 hospitals, 1,300 primary and specialized clinics and 400 pharmacies.

“This validates our approach, and it validates the opportunity,” Ofek said. “At the end of the day, these [integration] problems are common across different healthcare set-ups. It crosses every geographic market we’ve looked at.”