A Collaborative Model To Integrate Delivery Chain Information

As healthcare reform prompted the consolidation of independent regional healthcare providers into integrated delivery networks, the incompatibility of countless healthcare information systems posed crippling difficulties for the continued delivery of quality, costeffective care. The development of a standard framework to integrate the industry's disparate information systems became crucial to the rapidly evolving U.S. healthcare system. The Patient-Oriented Management System (POMS), an innovative patient-focused integration effort, brought together hundreds of healthcare professionals to develop an infrastructure that would allow the sophisticated, rapid exchange of data for real-time decision support across the healthcare delivery chain. Although the technological risk was high, Benchmarking Partners, with co-funding from the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), prototyped the POMS technology. As part of ATP's Focused Program, Information Infrastructure for Healthcare, the original healthcare-focused project encountered implementation obstacles, but a spin-off technology, Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR® ), met with significant commercial success and continues to improve the efficiency of supply chains in a wide variety of industries.