Omda Plutus

Omda Plutus is an event logging and monitoring platform that enables healthcare organisations to secure patient data compliance and de-risk clinical workflows.

Omda Plutus complies with the international IHE ATNA standard for medical audit logging, and features an intuitive interface to search and access patient data held by healthcare institutions, which are obliged by law to make this data available.

The monitoring functionality of Omda Plutus solves another important problem for healthcare professionals: how to receive a warning in real-time that a clinical workflow is failing. This requires a system with the counter-intuitive ability to identify events that did not happen at the very moment they are not happening. Omda Plutus is initially being implemented in other Omda digital healthcare solutions.

The two aspects of Omda Plutus, audit log compliance and event monitoring, respond to distinct healthcare requirements yet leverage similar technologies to achieve their aims.

Event logging

Every EU institution that collects, uses, and archives medical data is obliged by law to provide full transparency to patients about what data has been retained about them and who has accessed that data for what purpose.

Omda Plutus facilitates that by adhering to the one international standard established in this space, the IHE Audit Trail and Node Authentication (ATNA), and by offering an intuitive interface to interrogate data records.

ATNA describes how medical audit log records should be formatted and transported. The Omda Plutus application acts as an Audit Record Repository (ARR) which means that any system compliant with ATNA can send audit records to Omda Plutus. Records can then be searched in Omda Plutus. There is also functionality for exporting or archiving log records to disk volumes. Log records can be purged after a given time.

Omda Plutus has been implemented in several Omda digital healthcare solutions such as Omda CIMA, the mobile imaging solution; Omda XDS, the patient data storage and management solution; Omda Media, the capture, storage, and sharing tool for medial media; and Omda Cardio, the ECG-data management system. Omda Plutus can also be used by third parties because it is based on the ATNA standard.

Syslogs

Omda Plutus offers the additional functionality of collecting server-to-server message logs or syslogs.  The ATNA set of medical audit standards is based on the Unix syslog transport, which means that Omda Plutus uses syslog protocol. Based on that, it was decided to include basic syslog storing and searching capabilities within the Omda Plutus application.

Syslog messages contain information on timestamp, software, and server of the event, and present an easy way to include more unstructured logs for systems that cannot handle the ATNA standard.

Monitoring clinical workflows

The workflow module in Omda Plutus addresses a specific and important operational problem, namely identifying events that should have happened but did not. For flows with large throughput, this is like finding a needle in a haystack.

The Omda Plutus solution to this problem is to model the workflow, which sends a trigger when an event defined in this workflow did not take place. An “event” can be many different things. It can be a system-to-system communication (appointment made, barcode entered into the system), but it can also be a physical event, such as taking a blood sample or forwarding that sample to a laboratory. In other words, systems can equally well be humans doing actions requested by systems.

Events are also timeframes that define when or by when a certain action should have taken place (appointment scheduled within 24 hours of referral, laboratory completes analysis of tissue sample no later than two days after scanning the sample into its system).

Use cases of workflow monitoring solution

Medical workflows lend themselves well to this methodology because they are typically linear and strict. This means there are many use cases for the monitoring function of Omda Plutus. Within the portfolio of Omda solutions, the mobile imaging software Omda CIMA is a good example. If a photograph is taken with a sanctioned device, an event is created in Omda Plutus which then tracks the medical image or images making their way through the modelled workflow. No news is good news, and the system does not “comment” on successful events. However, if the device went offline and the encrypted images were not sent to the hospital, clinic, or specialist at all, or within the modelled timeframe, an alert would be triggered in Omda Plutus.

Omda is currently engaged in implementing a scanning workflow for a large Swedish health region. There are many steps, or events, between the decision to scan a document and the scanned data ending up in the correct repository. You print the barcode, affix it to the document, which is then transported physically to the scanning station, where it gets scanned and is uploaded to an archive – in the case of this project, the Omda XDS data storage and management solution.

But how do you know if one of the scans got lost for any reason, particularly if you process several thousands of medical documents a day? How do you prove a negative? This is the problem that Omda Plutus solves.

Why Omda Plutus?

• Compliant with IHE ATNA standard of medical audit logging
• Intuitive interface for accessing and searching log records
• Offers syslog storing and searching
• Monitoring solution alerts healthcare providers in real-time to disruptions in clinical workflows, allowing them to intervene much earlier to fix the problem
• Combined power of Omda Plutus: every healthcare body has to comply with data access laws; all healthcare bodies initiate many hundreds of clinical workflows every day but currently have no way of monitoring them effectively