3M Company
St. Paul, MN

3M Company, with co-funding from the NIST Advanced Technology Program (ATP) developed, integrated, and demonstrated key components for a healthcare information infrastructure that captures patient data, integrates it with clinical decision support and knowledge bases, and makes it available to all appropriate users. Specific components of the project included: a common medical data dictionary to facilitate the reliable storage and retrieval of complex medical information; a code translator to provide easy translation from one medical coding schema to another; database object development to enable data dictionary components to function within the enterprise domain; and an expert alert writer to route patient messages to care givers. The development of this "Plug and Play" open system technology initially focused on the healthcare industry, but has applications identified for non-healthcare domains, such as records management, electronics, images and video, and will result in a significant impact upon the U.S. economy. 3M has ten contracts and is aggressively commercializing this effort as part of their Health Enterprise Management System (HEMS); the company is actively pursuing relationships with many potential prospects who would be interested in the "Plug and Play" open system technology developed under this project. As a result of the ATP support, 3M was able to move this technology into the healthcare market two years ahead of schedule.

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Date created: February 1999
Last Update: April 24, 2003