When I decided to take PediNotes to market, some asked why would I want to enter such an arena. The philosophy after all almost dictated that hospitals use just a single software platform and the market was already dominated by large software corporations. For me, the answer was easy: Existing software products did not offer features that focused specifically on neonates and older infants. My patients were definitely not a priority for major hospital EMRs.
I get it. Our patients make up a smaller portion of the health care visits and dollars, and except for children’s hospital, adults have always been the focus of most institutions. It wasn’t until the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law in December 2016 that the federal government recognized the unique IT needs of children.
PediNotes was designed by a neonatologist (me) along with an accomplished group of software developers. We started by writing add on programs to improve existing neonatal software. When that was no longer enough, we decided to create PediNotes with the two “must have” caveats - interoperability and data analytics - before we would make it public.
Our interoperability approach allows us to take information from multiple sources and present it in a way that is intuitive and useful to clinicians. More importantly, we can work within existing hospital EMRs and our users’ work in an environment to create a workflow that’s conducive to better care. For physicians like me that work in different hospitals with different EMRs, being able to work in PediNotes in each of those hospitals makes life easier.
We have always viewed PediNotes as a tool for improving our clinical care. One of our standby sayings is “good software is software that doesn’t make you change the way you practice medicine.”
It goes without saying that the majority of neonatologists like data, and they want the data quickly (e.g. as soon as the question is asked). I spent many years asking my software developers to write queries to get the clinical data out for us to use. With PediAnalytics and data warehousing, those requests are now few and far between. PediAnalytics is a simple tool that returns very complex data. PediNotes’ data warehousing is even more powerful and coupled with Microsoft’s PowerBI, allows data analysis from multiple data sources such as the hospital EMR and other neonatal software that you might be using. Data is meant to be shared and PediNotes has the tools to do it. The one-button data extraction of Vermont Oxford data is a great example.
We are proud of what we are doing at PediNotes and truly believe this tool is improving the care of our patients. I would be happy to show it to anyone who has an interest in what we are doing.
Thanks for reading.
Steven B. Spedale, MD, FAAP
