Healthcare internal communication with message queues

Hospitals heavily rely on various digital records and systems to manage patient information. As the volume of digital information continues to grow, healthcare organizations face the ongoing challenge of ensuring effective internal communication among their systems.

Let’s explore some examples of how message queueing, a technology used across various industries, can be applied in healthcare.

Diagnostic test result delivery

Consider a scenario where a patient undergoes a series of diagnostic tests across different departments within a hospital. Each test generates data that needs to be delivered to the patient’s health record system. When sending diagnostic test results, we want the data to be safe and secure, ensuring no information is lost.

In such a scenario, message queueing comes into play. For instance, when the results of a diagnostic test become available, the system responsible for generating these results can place the data into a message queue. The health record system, in turn, retrieves this data from the queue and updates the patient’s record accordingly. By decoupling the data-producing system from the health record system, healthcare organizations ensure that critical information flows, regardless of the systems’ individual processing speeds or availability.

Medication management

Imagine a hospital pharmacy responsible for managing medication orders and inventory levels. With hundreds of medications stocked and numerous prescriptions processed daily, efficient communication between the pharmacy system, medication dispensing and inventory management is needed.

Message queuing can play a valuable role in this process.

When a physician prescribes medication for a patient, the prescription details are placed into a message queue by the prescribing system. The pharmacy system retrieves this information from the queue and verifies the prescription. Each message is acknowledged to ensure no information is lost during the process. Similarly, when medications are administered to patients or restocked, data is transmitted back to the pharmacy system via message queues, allowing for real-time updates to inventory levels and patient records.