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CHIME Calls for Stage 2 Extension in Letter to Senators

CIO organization underscores progress of EHR adoption, highlights importance of standards in Stage 2

ANN ARBOR, MI, May 6, 2013 – Following a request for feedback from Senators in Washington on the status of health IT adoption, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) issued a response declaring that a one-year extension of Meaningful Use Stage 2 would “maximize the opportunity of program success.”

The organization of healthcare CIOs said the additional 12-months for meeting Stage 2 “will give providers the opportunity to optimize their EHR technology and achieve the benefits of Stage 1 and Stage 2; it will give vendors the time needed to prepare, develop and deliver needed technology to correspond with Stage 3; and it will give policymakers time to assess and evaluate programmatic trends needed to craft thoughtful Stage 3 rules.”

In calling for an extension to Stage 2, CHIME defended much of the federal incentive program’s progress to date, arguing that fundamental shifts in health IT adoption and EHR product capabilities have been made possible through the policy of Meaningful Use.

“While we share some of your concerns with the current state of interoperability, we strongly believe that EHR incentive payments under the policy of Meaningful Use have been essential in moving the nation’s healthcare system into the 21st Century,” the CHIME letter said. “Through the EHR Incentive Payments program, CMS and ONC have begun to mitigate a fractured and incompatible state for EHRs.”

The response comes amid concerns levied by six Senators that the current direction of the HITECH program is flawed. The white paper released on April 16, “REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT,” outlines several concerns including increased health care costs, lack of momentum toward interoperability, patient privacy, and long-term program sustainability.

“Your report highlights a number of fair and responsible criticisms of the program and it echoes many of the concerns CHIME has voiced over the last three years,” the letter said. “But given the nation’s increased adoption of EHRs, the increased investments in interoperable solutions and the early-stage transformations encountered every day by our members, we remain convinced that the trajectory set by Meaningful Use is the correct one.

“CHIME believes the industry’s guiding principle should be to maximize the opportunity of program success and monitor the timelines needed to do that. For this reason, we formally and strongly recommend a one-year extension to Stage 2 before progressing to Stage 3 of Meaningful Use,” the organization concluded.

CHIME also called upon Congress to request an update from ONC on what technologies, architectures and strategies exist to mitigate patient matching errors; seek feedback from the public via congressional hearing or other formal commenting mechanism; and determine how current work at the S&I Framework could be leveraged to address the foundational challenge of patient data-matching.

Responding to a section of the white paper on audits and program integrity, CHIME said CIOs understand the desire to ensure that incentive payments are going to those who have qualified to receive them, but this intent must not result in unreasonable auditing efforts that are poorly structured, inconsistent or lack uniform criteria. “We ask that Congress ensure CMS audits are efficient and effective without overburdening providers,” the letter stated.

To read the full Senate response, visit the Public Policy section of the CHIME website.

About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,400 CIO members and over 95 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit www.cio-chime.org.

Contact:
Stephanie Fraser
Director of Communications
734-665-0000
sfraser@cio-chime.org

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May 6, 2013 I Written By John

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 5000 articles with John having written over 2000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 9.3 million times. John also recently launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit.

Tags:CHIME EHR Technology Healthcare Interoperability Hospital CIO Meaningful Use Stage 2 Delay MU Stage 2

ExtraHop Provides Insurance Policy for Healthcare Applications & IT Infrastructure with IT Operational Intelligence

Growing Number of Healthcare Organizations Rely on ExtraHop to Manage Major IT Initiatives such as Citrix VDI, EHR, and HIPAA

SEATTLE, WA, & NEW ORLEANS, LA — March 4, 2013 — ExtraHop announced today at the HIMSS13 Annual Conference and Exhibition that its real-time IT operational intelligence platform has been adopted by a growing number of healthcare organizations to ensure that vital technologies like desktop virtualization, picture archiving and communications systems (PACS), and electronic health records (EHR) are deployed and perform optimally. ExtraHop’s agentless, network-based platform provides correlated, cross-tier visibility to identify and solve problems quickly for organizations such as Practice Fusion, MedSolutions, and many more. ExtraHop delivers this deep visibility in a way that is compliant with HIPAA security and privacy standards.

In a 2012 survey of more than 500 IT decision makers, 44 percent of healthcare organizations indicated they plan to increase their adoption of server-hosted virtual desktops (SHVD) in 2013, a higher proportion than all other industries. However, while virtualization is a key healthcare initiative, patient care can suffer from latency or slow login times if organizations use legacy application performance monitoring tools, which cannot correlate issues across tiers.

The ExtraHop platform is verified as Citrix Ready® for Citrix XenDesktop®, Citrix XenApp™, and Citrix NetScaler® and provides essential IT operational intelligence through real-time analysis of the Citrix ICA wire protocol. John Smith, Netscaler/Citrix Architect at a major healthcare information technology company, and one of only 46 official Citrix Technology Professional Awardees, says of his experience: “ExtraHop is a great APM tool but it is also a great network monitoring tool and has value to every branch of my IT department. This is not a product whose value can be judged by finding its bubble in a scatter plot. I have not even scratched the surface of what this product can do.”

ExtraHop also offers healthcare organizations a way to monitor applications while complying with HIPAA security and privacy standards. Amidst 270 percent annual growth, Web-based EMR provider Practice Fusion found that only ExtraHop could provide real-time visibility across the network, web, database, and storage tiers without requiring any configuration and without risking privacy violations by storing packets. “We manage more than 50 million patient records,” says John Hluboky, VP of Technical Operations at Practice Fusion. “It’s incredibly important that ExtraHop can monitor all our traffic—even the encrypted traffic—and do it without any potential privacy violations.”

For healthcare cost-management services provider MedSolutions, ExtraHop equips every IT team member from application developers to the CIO with operational intelligence to continually improve everything from team collaboration to application rollouts to customer experience. Additionally, ExtraHop’s performance benchmarking abilities have enabled MedSolutions to migrate critical applications from physical to virtual environments—in one case saving $70,000 in hardware costs.

The ExtraHop platform meets the rigorous demands of modern healthcare applications and infrastructure by delivering key capabilities and supporting important initiatives, including the following:

· Visibility and monitoring for all clients, applications and infrastructure communicating over the network, regardless of technology or software platform

· Compliance and security insight that tracks logins by client as well as activity down to the file access level

· Support for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) efforts by automatically discovering and tracking new devices and clients, and distinguishing between those client types, including doctors’ tablets

· Plug-and-play deployment with no configuration required and no agents to install and maintain

· Proactive early warning to fix issues before customers are impacted or SLAs are breached.

· Automatic discovery and classification of all new applications and systems in the IT environment

· Drill-down capabilities that provide for transaction-specific analysis of problems

“Hospitals and doctors are under pressure to modernize, and they cannot afford disruptions or slow performance that would negatively impact patient care,” says Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. “The rapid adoption of our platform among companies in the healthcare space arises from the safety net that we provide, making sure that these new systems do what they should while also making IT operations less burdensome and expensive.”

To see how the ExtraHop operational intelligence platform can transform your healthcare IT organization, try it for free for 60 days by downloading the ExtraHop Discovery Edition. Visit us in booth #5755 at the HIMSS13 Annual Conference and Exhibition to learn more.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a quarter-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Gartner, Interop, and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

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March 4, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR

Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway and RelayHealth Announce Ground Breaking Alliance to Enable Integrated Health Care

First-of-its-kind effort to transform quality and cost effectiveness by enabling data liquidity across systems, settings and episodes of care

New Orleans, March 4, 2013 – Top health care information technology (HIT) companies Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway Medical Technologies® and RelayHealth announced today the launch of the CommonWell Health Alliance™, planned to be an independent not-for-profit organization that will support universal, trusted access to health care data through seamless interoperability. This historic effort is aimed at improving the quality of care delivery while working to lower costs for care providers, patients and the industry as a whole.

The Alliance intends to be a collaborative effort of suppliers who are focused on achieving data liquidity between systems, in compliance with patient authorizations. The Alliance will define, promote and certify a national infrastructure with common platforms and policies. It also will ensure that HIT products displaying the Alliance seal are certified to work on the national infrastructure.

“Today’s announcement represents an inflection point in health care, with key industry leaders coming together to support the delivery of a national health information exchange,” said John Hammergren, chairman and CEO, McKesson Corp. “The formation of this alliance takes health care a step closer to broad industry interoperability. A national and trusted health information exchange will break down the information silos in health care and should dramatically improve the quality and cost effectiveness of care delivery. Creating data liquidity between all HIT developers is fundamental to improving patient care, enhancing the vitality of the health care industry, and strengthening the long-term health of our nation.”

“We believe the industry needs to step up to the challenges of interoperability,” noted Neal Patterson, co-founder, chairman, CEO and president, Cerner. “If we can rise to the challenge as an industry, we have a chance to deliver a golden era of health care. It is a system where consumers not only have a right to their data, but also have the ability to mobilize it in the pursuit of better health. This alliance is about setting aside the admittedly tough politics of this issue to do what is right for the health care consumer. We at Cerner are proud to play a leadership role in this exciting effort.”

Elements of the Alliance’s national infrastructure will be tested in a local pilot within the next year. Early components will include the following core services:

Cross-entity patient linking and matching services: Help developers and providers link and match patients as they transition through care facilities, regardless of the underlying software system
Patient consent and data access management: Foster HIPAA-compliant and simple patient-centered management of data sharing consents and authorizations
Patient record locator and directed query services: Help providers deliver a history of recent patient care encounters, and, with appropriate authorization, patient data across multiple providers and episodes of care

“The formation of the CommonWell Health Alliance will be a significant step forward toward the electronic exchange of health information to support clinicians and patients,” said Janet Marchibroda, director of the Health Innovation Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “The founding members of the Alliance are focused on exactly the right foundational areas, and it’s terrific to see industry leaders stepping up to solve the problem of interoperability on behalf of providers and patients everywhere.”

“Allscripts’ vision has been to create a true Connected Community of Health. We believe open platforms are required to realize that vision and make the improvements our health care delivery system needs to dramatically improve outcomes while reducing cost,” said Paul Black, president and CEO, Allscripts. “This alliance provides a framework that will enable patient identification and record-sharing for providers across the nation. This is good for care providers, for patients and for the country. We are proud to be a founding member and to help lead this important effort.”

“Greenway has anticipated this evolution to a smarter health care system based on open collaboration and data flow,” said Tee Green, president and CEO, Greenway. “We’ve been telling caregivers the marketplace can provide it and sustain it, and they are right to expect it. Consumers are no different, and a patient-enabled approach to data access will foster a deeper and more efficient patient-provider relationship. Allowing data to flow more freely fits the needs of a mobile society just as providers are taking on more financial risk in coordinating care. We are committed to the Alliance goals and our ongoing participation as this initiative grows.”

“We’ve built athenahealth on the vision that health care needs an information backbone that facilitates and incents true health information exchange. However, the promise of the free flow of health information and the reality of it today are worlds apart,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and chairman, athenahealth, Inc. “We support the CommonWell Health Alliance because we believe that being open matters, especially when it comes to patient care. CommonWell’s efforts to bring major developers together to pilot patient linking and matching across IT systems and care settings is an important step in the right direction. We look forward to helping lead these efforts as a founding member of the Alliance.”

Members of the Alliance are committed to collaborating with all HIT developers to realize the vision of integrated health care and encourage other HIT companies to join the CommonWell Health Alliance by visiting www.commonwellalliance.org. The founding members of the Alliance will be holding a press conference on March 4, 2013 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CT at the HIMSS 2013 Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. The event will also be livestreamed atwww.webcasts.com/March4PressEvent. Please visit www.commonwellalliance.org for additional details.

About CommonWell Health Alliance

CommonWell Health Alliance is anticipated to be an independent not-for-profit trade association of HIT companies that will work together to create universal access to patient health care data. The Alliance will be open to all health information technology developers that are committed to making patient’s data available to themselves and providers regardless of where care occurs. Alliance members will support the belief that provider access to this data must be built-in to health information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the patients they serve.

The founding members of CommonWell Health Alliance invite all HIT suppliers to join us in working together to provide seamless, trusted access to health information, in support of better, more cost-effective care for our patients and communities.

To learn more about the CommonWell Health Alliance, please visit www.commonwellalliance.org.

About Cerner

Cerner Corp. (NASDAQ: CERN) is contributing to the systemic change of health and care delivery. For more than 30 years Cerner has been executing its vision to make health care safer and more efficient. We started with the foundation of digitizing paper processes and now offer the most comprehensive array of information software, professional services, medical device integration, remote hosting and employer health and wellness services. Cerner systems are used by everyone from individual consumers, to single-doctor practices, hospitals, employers and entire countries. Taking what we’ve learned over more than three decades, Cerner is building on the knowledge that is in the system to support evidence-based clinical decisions, prevent medical errors and empower patients in their care.

Cerner® solutions are licensed by approximately 10,000 facilities around the world, including more than 2,700 hospitals; 4,150 physician practices; 45,000 physicians; 550 ambulatory facilities, such as laboratories, ambulatory centers, behavioral health centers, cardiac facilities, radiology clinics and surgery centers; 800 home health facilities; 40 employer sites and 1,750 retail pharmacies.

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation (NYSE: MCK), currently ranked 14th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to making the business of healthcare run better. We partner with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson helps its customers improve their financial, operational, and clinical performance with solutions that include pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management, healthcare information technology, and business and clinical services. For more information, visit us at www.mckesson.com.

About Allscripts
Allscripts (NASDAQ: MDRX) delivers the insights that healthcare providers require to generate world-class outcomes. The company’s Electronic Health Record, practice management and other clinical, revenue cycle, connectivity and information solutions create a Connected Community of Health™ for physicians, hospitals and post-acute organizations. To learn more about Allscripts, please visit www.allscripts.com, Twitter, YouTube and It Takes A Community: The Allscripts Blog.

About athenahealth
athenahealth, Inc. is a leading provider of cloud-based Best in KLAS electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and care coordination services to medical groups and health systems. athenahealth’s mission is to be the most trusted service to medical care givers, helping them do well by doing the right thing. For more information, please visit www.athenahealth.com or call 888-652-8200.

About Greenway Medical Technologies

Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: GWAY) delivers innovative software and business service solutions for healthcare providers through its PrimeSUITE^® platform. As a certified and fully integrated electronic health record, practice management and interoperability solution, Greenway PrimeSUITE helps improve care coordination, quality and cost-efficiency as part of a smarter, sustainable healthcare system. Thousands of care providers across primary care and more than 30 specialties and sub-specialties use cloud-based or on-premise Greenway^® solutions in healthcare enterprises, physician practices and clinics nationwide. www.greenwaymedical.com

About RelayHealth

RelayHealth, McKesson’s connectivity business, enables the trusted exchange of clinical, financial and administrative information between patients, providers, payers, pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and government agencies. RelayHealth processes nearly 16 billion healthcare transactions annually by integrating the delivery of high-quality care and improving the financial outcomes for its customers. For more information, call 888.743.8735, or visit our Web site atwww.RelayHealth.com. Follow us on Twitter (@RelayHealth) or visit the RelayHealth Facebook page.

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I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare Healthcare Interoperability Healthcare IT HIE Hospital IT

Tags:Allscripts Athenahealth Cerner Commonwell Health Alliance Greenway John Hammergren Jonathan Bush McKesson Neal Patterson Paul Black

80 Percent of US Physicians Believe Virtual Assistants Will Drastically Change Healthcare by 2018, Nuance Survey Finds

Nuance Enhances the IQ of Intelligent Systems, Offering a Glimpse of Tomorrow’s Healthcare

BURLINGTON, Mass., – February 27, 2013 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), the first to bring the power of the virtual assistant directly to consumers through mobile phones and customer service attendants, recently surveyed US doctors about the effect virtual assistants will have on healthcare. Overwhelmingly, 80 percent believe that within five years, virtual assistants will drastically change how they interact and use electronic health records (EHRs) and other healthcare apps, making them more efficient and freeing up time to spend on patients.

Doctors stated that mobile virtual assistants could impact healthcare most by helping them access information in EHRs, and navigate through the process using conversational commands. One out of three doctors spends 30 percent or more of their day on administrative duties — activities that could be redirected or removed using voice-enabled virtual assistants.

How will virtual assistants put the care back in healthcare?

65 percent say the top role for a virtual assistant: more accurate, timely information to support care or alert them to missing information in records.
73 percent expect virtual assistants could improve healthcare and patient engagement by helping to coordinate care between multiple caregivers.
80 percent believe virtual assistants will benefit patients most by engaging them in the process, prompting them to adhere to health advice and modifying behaviors.

“Mobile virtual assistants have the potential to reinvent the way we deliver patient care,” says Dr. Alireza Shafaie, Palo Alto Medical Foundation. “As a consumer, I already experience the value of mobile assistants, and would love to bring that natural, intelligence-based dialogue to my work as a primary care physician. For every one patient I see I have to communicate my recommendations in three different places. A mobile advisor that could do that on my behalf in one shot would give me back more time in what truly matters – time with my patients.”

One area of interest with physicians is intelligent, voice-driven, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) that uses more sophisticated reasoning for ordering medications, labs and radiology exams beyond mere speech. Healthcare developers can embed virtual assistants — ones that conduct meaningful conversations, interpret physician requests, ask for clarification and seamlessly manage changes in course of action much like their human equivalents — directly into any clinical app to enhance a variety of new and existing workflows, including CPOE.

Nuance is deeply invested in a new generation of sophisticated and powerful applications underpinned by voice and clinical language understanding (CLU) that reinvents the way doctors and patients experience healthcare, providing direct access to the healthcare information that matters most.

“The technology exists today in Nuance to create a more intuitive way for doctors and patients to coordinate care and improve efficiency through dialogue-driven intelligent systems that hear, understand and respond,” reports Joe Petro, senior vice president healthcare engineering and R&D, Nuance.

More than 500 global developers are already utilizing Nuance technology to humanize healthcare and fulfill the promise of virtual assistants in medicine. For a first glimpse of Nuance’s new healthcare virtual assistant project, codenamed “Florence,” visit booth #4025 at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference & Exhibits in New Orleans March 3 – 7, 2013.

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February 28, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR Electronic Health Record Healthcare Mobile Health

Tags:Clinical Language Understanding ealthcare Information and Management Systems Society healthcare engineering HIMSS Inc Joe Petro NASDAQ: NUAN NUAN Nuance Nuance Communications Palo Alto Medical Foundation r. Alireza Shafaie

DataMotion Developers Toolkit Facilitates Quick Integration with Direct Messaging, Enabling Providers to Qualify for Meaningful Use Stage 2 Incentives

Toolkit Offers Lucrative Market Opportunities to EHR, HIE and IDN Vendors by Helping
Healthcare Providers Overcome Complexities and Qualify for Potential Subsidies

MORRISTOWN, N.J. – February 27, 2013 – DataMotion (www.datamotion.com), a health information service provider (HISP) offering secure data delivery services, today introduced the DataMotion Direct Toolkit. The Toolkit enables Health Information Systems (HIS) vendors who develop electronic health record (EHR), health information exchange (HIE) and integrated delivery network (IDN) solutions to qualify their systems’ interoperability capabilities as required for Meaningful Use Stage 2 incentive payments.

Often times, secure messaging and PKI encryption are not core competencies of HIS vendors. Rather than build a solution in-house, vendors can now quickly add required Direct functionality by leveraging the DataMotion Direct Toolkit. This shortens time to market for HIS vendors and helps them quickly seize lucrative new market opportunities.

“As we were looking for an expert in the development of Direct messaging functionality, DataMotion came out as the clear choice,” said Mark Pilarski, vice president, product generation for T-System, Inc., the industry leader in clinical, financial and operational solutions for emergency medicine. “After researching prospective HISPs it was clear that DataMotion had the most robust offering. Since engaging their team, we’ve been impressed with the strength and simplicity of the application programming interface (API) and their knowledgeable and responsive tech support. Best of all, we’ve found them to be flexible and easy to do business with. We look forward to offering an integrated Direct solution to our user base.”

Through the Toolkit, HIS vendors’ customers can take advantage of DataMotion Direct, a cloud-based secure data transfer service that enables healthcare organizations of all sizes to meet compliance demands and real-world communications needs. The Toolkit’s ease-of-use allows rapid integration - usually in less than a month. The turnkey solution is regularly updated to meet new industry requirements. Designed to interoperate with disparate systems, provider organizations can also avoid vendor lock-in to ensure the greatest return on technology investments and the ability to take advantage of new developments in the future.

The DataMotion Direct Toolkit includes:

· A robust suite of APIs to facilitate integration of Direct messaging into any EHR/EMR, HIE or IDN application
· An easy-to-follow implementation guide
· Pre-integration consulting
· Integration engineering support
· Tier-1 technical support during third-party certification testing
· One year membership in the DataMotion Direct Developers Consortium

“Our Toolkit offers vendors a tremendous opportunity to quickly meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements,” said Bob Janacek, co-founder and chief technology officer for DataMotion. “Whether you want DataMotion to provide the entire messaging interface inside of your solution, or simply need your existing messaging interface to communicate through Direct protocols, the DataMotion Direct Toolkit provides a rapid and easy way to accomplish this.”

The DataMotion Direct Toolkit is available immediately. For more information, vendors should visit http://www.datamotion.com/DirectProject/HealthcareDirectvendor.aspx, email sales@datamotion.com or call (800) 672-7233.

About DataMotion

DataMotion enables organizations to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of delivering electronic information to employees, customers and partners in a secure and compliant way. The company’s core DataMotion Platform solves a broad range of business issues by providing a secure data delivery hub. DataMotion’s easy-to-use solutions for secure email, file transfer, forms processing and customer contact leverage the DataMotion Platform for unified data delivery. Millions of users worldwide rely on DataMotion to transparently improve business processes and reduce costs, while mitigating security and compliance risk. DataMotion is privately held and based in Morristown, N.J.

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February 27, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR

Tags:Bob Janacek cloud-based secure data transfer service DataMotion DataMotion Direct DataMotion Direct Toolkit EHR Electronic Health Record Health Information Exchange health information service provider health information systems HIE HIS HISP IDN Inc integrated delivery network Mark Pilarski Meaningful Use Stage 2 T-System

ENCORE HEALTH RESOURCES LAUNCHES VALUE-BASED PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT™ SOLUTIONS SUITE POWERED BY CoreANALYTICS™

New lifecycle of services and software tools developed in partnership with CHI

HOUSTON – February 26, 2013 – Encore Health Resources, an award-winning health-information technology (HIT) services company, announced today the launch of its new Value-based Performance Improvement™ (VPI) suite of services and software. VPI features CoreANALYTICS™, a set of integrated analytical tools that helps drive continuous health-system performance improvement. In an industry moving rapidly from volume- to value-based reimbursement, VPI and CoreANALYTICS comprise a uniquely comprehensive solution that transforms data generated by electronic health record (EHR), financial, and operational systems into actionable intelligence for proactive management of patient populations, quality, and costs.

Encore’s Value-based Performance Improvement with CoreANALYTICS is poised to assist health systems meet and exceed thresholds for the quality and performance measures required to qualify for U.S. Government EHR Meaningful-Use incentive payments and avoid associated penalties—as well as manage emerging, at-risk government and commercial payment models. This new solution suite converts relevant data into intelligent, practical ways to help key stakeholders – including hospitals, physicians, and their patients – successfully navigate through and beyond challenges posed by the healthcare industry’s rapid shift from fee-for-service to fee-for-value.

Key VPI and CoreANALYTICS differentiators include a unique blend of Encore’s seasoned consultants with in-depth understanding of clinical data, proven methodologies and vendor-neutral analytical tools. These new tools help healthcare organizations focus on relevant quality and performance data while leveraging existing business-intelligence investments. This new, focused approach accelerates a client’s reimbursement transformation at a competitively low cost of entry through all stages of EHR Meaningful Use and also prepares them for evolving reimbursement models. VPI supports Value-Based Purchasing, Patient Centered Medical Homes, Clinical Integration Networking, and Accountable Care Organizations.

Another key differentiator is that CoreANALYTICS’ architecture allows for full or modular deployment. A full deployment includes the Data Acquisition Engine (extract, translate, and load); the Integrated Information Platform, including our Analytics Engine (creates a “smart, skinny” data warehouse); and the Quality and Performance Modules (building dynamic dashboards), which together provide a comprehensive data-to-information transformation solution. At the heart of the suite is Encore’s exclusive Analytics Engine, which enriches information through proven data derivation and measure calculations. These modular components can also be layered with an organization’s established data warehouse or reporting capability for a comprehensive, cost-effective solution.

Encore built its new solutions suite with development partner Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI). Today, CHI is successfully testing VPI and CoreANALYTICS to optimize its OneCare Program, a $2 billion, enterprise-wide initiative to advance patient care through the power of information. Using VPI and CoreANALYTICS, CHI’s goals are to leverage OneCare to create a powerful, information-based system that will drive significant improvements in patient care throughout its 70 hospitals across the U.S.

“Our partnership with Encore has significantly extended the power of OneCare to provide ‘in-time’ information that will help CHI understand how we are performing against our goals,” said Evon Holladay, MGA, Vice President, Enterprise Intelligence, Catholic Health Initiatives.

As the centerpiece of the VPI lifecycle of performance improvement services, CoreANALYTICS is focused on measures targeted at specific quality and performance data from source systems. It dynamically updates measures calculations to meet the demands of a rapidly transforming industry. Encore’s CoreGPS® Data Tool informs the Analytics Engine and eliminates the need for custom coding for new measures and calculations, thereby creating a lower-cost analytics solution.

The CoreANALYTICS Quality and Reporting Modules provide integrated views of actionable information and insight into quality and performance across patient populations. These modules include:

Meaningful Use Compliance and Reporting Module: Focused on analysis and reporting for successful participation in the CMS EHR Incentive Program and subsequent stages.
At-Risk Population Module: Analysis and reporting focused on high-cost, at-risk populations including analysis for care processes and utilization and performance against specific measures.
Clinical Analytics for Care Coordination Module: Provides physicians “in time” information using dashboards and reports to manage patients with preventive guidelines stratified by disease state.
Financial Analytics: Analyzes cost savings achieved through clinical integration efforts and new care processes calculated within specific treatment patterns, clinical focus areas, populations, or globally.

“Encore’s partnership with CHI created a demanding laboratory that presented real-world challenges in dozens of hospitals with multiple EHR systems and a unified goal for improved care delivery in an unprecedented environment of change,” said Dana Sellers, CEO, Encore Health Resources. “The result is our Value-based Performance Improvement lifecycle of services, featuring the CoreANALYTICS road-tested software tools, which are now ready to help clients across our industry gain new insights that drive increasing value throughout their organizations and a future of intelligent health performance.”

About Catholic Health Initiatives

Catholic Health Initiatives is a national nonprofit health system with headquarters in Englewood, Colo. The faith-based system operates in 19 states and includes 81 hospitals; 40 long-term care, assisted- and residential-living facilities; two community health-services organizations; two accredited nursing colleges; and home health agencies. In fiscal year 2012, CHI provided more than $715 million in charity care and community benefit, including services for the poor, free clinics, education and research. With total annual revenues of more than $10.7 billion and approximately 86,000 employees, CHI ranks as the nation’s second-largest faith-based health system.

About Encore Health Resources (Encore)

Founded by healthcare veterans Ivo Nelson and Dana Sellers, Encore provides information technology consulting services and solutions to assist healthcare organizations with a wide range of strategy, advisory, implementation, process-redesign, and optimization activities. Encore focuses on capturing data and establishing the analytical capabilities to meet the evolving information and reporting needs for health care providers to improve and document clinical and operational performance.

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February 26, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR Electronic Health Record Healthcare

Tags:Catholic Health Initiatives CoreANALYTICS CoreGPS® Data Tool Dana Sellers EHR EHR Meaningful Use Electronic Health Record ENCORE HEALTH Encore Health Resources Enterprise Intelligence Evon Holladay Health Information Technology HIMSSS13 HIT Meaningful Use Meaningful Use Compliance and Reporting Module OneCare Program U.S. Government EHR Meaningful-Use incentive VPI

EMRapproved and HealthITxChange Collaborate to Benefit Healthcare and IT Professionals in the Adoption of Health IT

Partnership debuts at HIMSS13 in New Orleans

CHICAGO, Feb. 25, 2013 – Chicago health information technology (health IT) company EMRapproved is announcing a new collaboration with HealthITxChange, an online community where healthcare practitioners and health IT professionals share best practices and lessons learned throughout their electronic health record (EMR/EHR) implementation and ongoing health IT lifecycle.

The collaboration brings together both sites’ audiences who will share information and resources to benefit the health IT community at large. HealthITxChange partner organizations include the AHIMA Foundation, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the American Nurses Association (ANA) and Health Level Seven International (HL7).

“EMRapproved is committed to providing comprehensive resources for the adoption of health information technology and electronic health records (EMR/EHR) for industry professionals,” explained EMRapproved CEO Kevin Donnelly. “HealthITxChange is unique in that they create an interactive and engaged community where members share knowledge and exchange ideas. Our mutual focus and priorities make this a truly strategic partnership.”

Combining the collaborative nature of a forum with the oversight of a medical publication, HealthITxChange brings together clinicians and health IT professionals to share their knowledge and best practices through “pearls” of information to summarize their collective experiences. These pearls are linked to in-depth discussions which provide users with the details of real life encounters on the road to implementation and Meaningful Use.

Visitors to EMRapproved.com, in particular the 900+ members of its 4Med Pro Network of consultants, will benefit from seamless access to the HealthITxChange pearls – and thus the collective wisdom and best practices of this thriving community.

Completing the collaboration, EMRapproved will link its 4Med Marketplace to the new HealthITxChange site. The 4Med Marketplace will provide a gateway for HealthITxChange members to access education and certification courses; EMR-related products; and consulting services (through the EMRapproved 4Med Pro Network).

“HealthITxChange’s primary goal is to foster community and collaboration among healthcare and health IT professionals. We are excited to unveil our added functionality that will support community collaboration,” said Helga Rippen, MD, PhD, chair of the HealthITxChange executive council. “By partnering with EMRapproved we are able to generate funds to continue to enhance the site but also provide our members access to the 4Med Marketplace, where they will find valuable, relevant resources all in one location.”

EMRapproved and HealthITxChange will be exhibiting at the HIMSS13 Annual Conference & Exhibition in New Orleans at adjacent booths (#7916 and #7914) to highlight the benefits of the collaboration for the health IT industry. Show attendees will be able to see demonstrations of the various components of the collaboration, register for community membership, and become marketplace sponsors and benefactors of the organizations. Booth interaction opportunities include on-demand new sponsor signup; site resource demonstrations, side-by-side product comparisons and more.

HealthITxChange is supported by Westat Insight — Center for Health Information Technology for the Rockville Institute for the Advancement of Social Sciences, a 501(c)(3) charitable, tax-exempt organization whose mission is to advance the social sciences by conducting research and disseminating research findings to the public.

About the Rockville Institute

A Research Institute for the Advancement of Social Science is a non-profit (501c3) organization that operates exclusively for charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. Westat is an affiliate organization of the Rockville Institute and makes its full range of corporate resources available to the Institute to perform Institute contracts and grants. Visit http://www.HealthITxChange.org.

About EMRapproved

EMRapproved is a robust health information technology (health IT) and electronic medical record (EMR) resource, providing assistance to professionals at all stages of the health IT implementation process by providing access to invaluable content, community, curriculum and consulting resources in one centralized location. The company offers free industry updates, tools and resources, including topical industry update columns HITAnswers and HITSecurity; provides education, certification and career retraining programs through its 4Med Pro Training program; and facilitates online networking, collaboration and professional consultation through its 4Med Pro Network. Support for the free resources available from EMRapproved is provided by sponsors of its new 4Med Marketplace, where users can buy health IT-related products and services. Learn more at http://www.emrapproved.com/.

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February 25, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare Healthcare IT

CareCloud Reports Record Growth in 2012; Drives Adoption of Cloud-Based Solutions by Physicians Nationwide

Company Accelerates Market Momentum with Launch of New Clinical and Patient Applications, Enterprise Customer Wins, and Leadership Expansion

MIAMI–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CareCloud, a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health records (EHR), and medical billing software and services, today announced that the company concluded 2012 with its 12^th quarter of consecutive revenue growth. Highlights included: the expansion of CareCloud’s customer base of medical groups into 45 states; the achievement of more than $1.5 billion in annualized accounts receivables under management; the inclusion of more than 4.5 million patients on its platform; and the addition of key executives, many from its leading competitors. Across the board, accelerating market demand was driven by practices migrating from outdated client-server technologies to the company’s modern cloud-based clinical and financial applications and services.

“In just three years, CareCloud has made substantial progress in its mission to replace the outdated core of healthcare technology that burdens US medical groups. We experienced our most rapid growth to date during 2012 and concluded the year with more than 2,000 providers in 45 states representing more than 50 specialties, all while securing a 96% client retention rate,” said Albert Santalo, Chairman and CEO of CareCloud. “We also completed a full suite of what is now the industry’s most modern and flexible clinical, financial, and administrative applications. Along the way, CareCloud on-boarded smaller practices at a record pace while also securing significant enterprise accounts.”

Product and Platform Expansion Support Growth

This past year saw CareCloud make substantial innovations to its core software applications and services. The company launched CareCloud Charts, its cloud-based EHR; introduced its new Mobile Patient Portal offering, enabling patients to access their health records through iPhones and iPads; and invested in operational improvements to help practices implement faster, collect more, and run their operations more efficiently. The launch of Charts completed CareCloud’s powerful suite of fully integrated clinical, financial, and administrative applications, accessible by practices 24/7 from any browser, platform, and location. Furthermore, its flexible platform allowed these applications to be made available to practices either as a full suite or on a standalone basis – reflecting a growing market demand.

Company Bolsters Senior Leadership

CareCloud significantly expanded its senior leadership team across sales, marketing, product development, operations, and technology in 2012. The year began with the addition of Paul Henry and Brad Blakey as Vice Presidents of Small Practice and Group Sales, respectively. Mr. Henry, formerly the Vice President of Sales for ADP/AdvancedMD, now oversees CareCloud’s growing small practice sales team. Mr. Blakey leads CareCloud’s group practice sales efforts, leveraging more than two decades of sales operational experience from leadership positions at Nextgen Healthcare Solutions and athenahealth. With the addition of these executives and a growing national sales team, CareCloud was able to experience tremendous momentum across all its product lines, achieving more than a 300% increase in year over year new sales bookings.

2012 also saw major strides in CareCloud’s ability to market its cloud-based solutions, generate qualified leads, and drive overall awareness. Joe Sawyer joined as Vice President of Marketing, bringing significant enterprise software and healthcare-specific marketing experience. Mr. Sawyer had previously worked as Vice President of Marketing for American Well, a Boston-based leader in telemedicine technology, as well as at SAP, Accenture, and Forrester Research. CareCloud also experienced an increase in its public relations and overall awareness capabilities during the year with the addition of John Hallock as its Vice President of Corporate Communications. Mr. Hallock was formerly head of corporate communications for athenahealth.

To fuel product, operational, and technology excellence, CareCloud secured a leader in clinical software applications while expanding its account management and support functions. Edwin Miller joined the company as Vice President of Product Management. Mr. Miller, who most recently held leadership positions at Practice Fusion and athenahealth, is now responsible for the design and rollout of CareCloud’s entire product set. In November, Ralph Catalano joined the company as the new Vice President of Operations. He came to CareCloud after spending nearly 10 years at athenahealth where he held various operational leadership positions, including leading all operations. The year concluded with the hiring of John Walsh as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to CareCloud, Mr. Walsh was Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations for Constant Contact®, Inc., a leading online marketing company offering email, social media, survey and event marketing tools. He brings unique experience with web-scaling in business-to-business environments that will play a central role in evolving CareCloud’s product architecture moving forward.

Santalo continued, “Heading into 2012, it was critical for CareCloud to recruit and assemble some of the most talented and experienced executives both inside and outside of our industry. I feel we now have an unparalleled senior leadership team. It’s these leaders and their respective teams that will allow us to continue experiencing tremendous growth in all phases of operations, disrupt legacy healthcare IT vendors, and evangelize the ‘cloud’ in healthcare.”

Physicians Making the Switch to the “Cloud”

In 2012, 93 percent of CareCloud’s new customers signed up because they were looking to replace outdated practice management and billing systems, feeling it was critical to maintaining their financial success. During the past year, the government implemented a series of regulations that significantly impact the way doctors and their staffs administer care and gain reimbursement. As a result, these practices discovered that their previous systems – many developed in the 1980s and 1990s – would not easily accommodate the changes.

“As a medical clinic supporting a continuing care retirement community, our patients’ healthcare needs range from routine wellness visits to traditional primary care, as well as coordination with external specialists. This requires us to have the best possible care coordination in place. Having the latest technology to assist us is critical,” said Bill Cohen, Director of the Horizon House Medical Clinic, Seattle, Washington.

“Our clinic needs to stay as current as possible with the changing reimbursement requirements relating to Medicare and other commercial insurance. We found that our client server electronic health record and practice management system was cost prohibitive and the outsourced management of the system was insufficiently responsive to our needs,” added Cohen. “Our switch to a cloud-based system has already allowed us to cut costs while positioning our clinic to stay current with changes in the healthcare system that impact both us and our patients.”

In late 2012, CareCloud made available a guide designed to assist care providers and their staff through the process of assessing practice management needs, finding a new practice management and billing software system, and successfully replacing old systems. The intention was to educate and assist physician practices as they look to learn more about cloud-based technologies.

This white paper and practice management guide, “Time to Switch: Your Complete Guide to Practice Management System Replacement” is available online and marks the beginning of a series of forthcoming market research and analysis focused on improving practice profitability.

About CareCloud

CareCloud is a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health record (EHR) and medical billing software and services for medical groups. The company’s products are connecting providers to one another – and to their patients – through a fully integrated digital healthcare ecosystem that can be accessed on any browser or device.

CareCloud is helping over 2,000 thousand providers increase collections, streamline operations and improve patient care in more than 45 states. The company received over $20 million in Series A funding from Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners in 2011. To learn more about CareCloud, please visit www.carecloud.com.

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February 22, 2013 I Written By John

Filed Under: Cloud Computing EHR Electronic Health Record Healthcare

iChartsMD Launches their new ED (Emergency Department) Software

Malibu, CA – February 18, 2013 –

iChartsMD announced today that they have successfully implemented a full EHR platform solution for emergency room and triage areas of hospitals, urgent care facilities, and ambulatory centers. While assisting a Hospital in New Orleans with their EHR solutions, it was apparent that the emergency areas of the hospital needed a solution that was not readily offered as a turnkey solution. While many vendors and providers could offer snippets of solutions, or promise a system that would cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, there was never a full-fledged system that could offer all the tools necessary for a fast-moving environment while ensuring top-notch care and safety could be adhered; Until now.

iChartsMD has built and implemented a total solution EHR package that will give the flexibility of an urgent care facility, while providing the ambulatory needs of triage, nursing stations, multiple room mapping, up-to-the-second updates on patients from check-in to discharge, and a full functioning billing module that will keep tabs of all invoices for insurers and Medicare alike.

While iChartsMD is not a new company to the EMR world, they are cognizant of the fact that with innovation comes great reinvention. With this enhanced platform, emergency departments, urgent care facilities as well as hospitals will benefit greatly from the powerful software that has been developed at a price that is a manageable expense. With iChartsMD entering into a new realm of expertise, both patients and the medical experts are the benefactors with a full-fledged ED EHR solution now being provided in the emergency environments.

About iChartsMD: iChartsMD is a privately held EHR software solution provider based out of Santa Monica, California. Both doctors and I.T. Professionals carefully developed the iChartsMD technology with over 30 years of expertise. The EHR system integrates patient scheduling, reports and analysis, prescription writing, patient history and billing management made to be accessible from any network, including mobile devices.

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I Written By John

Filed Under: EHR Electronic Health Record Healthcare

Tags:EHR EHR software solution Emergency Department Software iChartsMD

Expanded DynaMed™ and Isabel Relationship Creates Powerful Integration of Diagnosis and Treatment Information Tools

Evidence-Based Medicine Expands to Differential Diagnosis through Integration

IPSWICH, Mass. — February 18, 2013 — The growing relationship between two valuable resources that provide vital point-of-care information to healthcare providers has the potential to significantly impact the quality of patient care. The integration and a new reselling agreement between DynaMed^™ , the premier evidence-based clinical information resource and Isabel Healthcare, which produces the highly respected differential diagnosis tool Isabel, seamlessly extends evidence-based medicine into diagnosis decision-making.

Extending evidence-based medicine into diagnosis will give clinicians key information necessary to help differentiate between the diagnoses suggested by Isabel and to decide on the next steps. Mutual customers can link from Isabel to access the evidence-based information in DynaMed, and it is now even easier for customers to acquire and integrate the two resources. The recently expanded partnership between DynaMed and Isabel allows healthcare organizations to easily purchase Isabel directly from EBSCO Publishing, the parent company of DynaMed. The strength of these combined resources along with DynaMed’s and Isabel’s ability to integrate into most Electronic Health Record systems, make it a convenient and indispensible tool for answering most clinical questions during practice.

Isabel is the industry-leading diagnosis decision support system designed to help broaden the differential and provide testing and treatment information at the point of need. For a given set of signs and symptoms, Isabel presents the clinician with a list of likely diagnoses to consider, and each diagnosis is linked to knowledge to help with further investigation, potential testing and treatment. The Isabel system has been extensively validated and is currently being used by leading healthcare systems to improve efficiency in decision making.

Jason Maude, founder of Isabel Healthcare, explained the power of the integrations between Isabel and DynaMed. “The DynaMed editorial team creates robust, evidence-based content that perfectly complements the differential diagnosis content in Isabel. The seamless integration between the two products creates a powerful synergy to improve efficiency in diagnosis decision making. As the first and most important decision made about the patient, getting the correct diagnosis and treatment as soon as possible enhances outcomes and reduces costs. The new platform also means that the content from other EBSCO products can be integrated and drawn to the clinician’s attention when needed.”

DynaMed Editor-in-Chief, Brian S. Alper, MD, MSPH, FAAFP, says this relationship with Isabel supports DynaMed’s core mission. “Providing clinicians the most useful information at the point of care is the goal of DynaMed and this partnership allows clinicians even more in-the-moment ways to bring evidence-based medicine into their practice.”

DynaMed is a clinical reference tool created by physicians for physicians and other health care professionals for use at the point-of-care. With clinically-organized summaries for more than 3,200 topics, DynaMed provides the latest content and resources with validity, relevance and convenience, making DynaMed an indispensable resource for answering most clinical questions during practice.

Updated daily, DynaMed editors monitor the content of over 500 medical journals on a daily basis. Each article is evaluated for clinical relevance and scientific validity. The new evidence is then integrated with existing content, and overall conclusions are changed as appropriate, representing a synthesis of the best available evidence. Through this process of systematic literature surveillance, the best available evidence determines the content of DynaMed.

For more information about Isabel and its integration with DynaMed, visit www.ebscohost.com/biomedical-libraries/isabel.

About Isabel Healthcare
Isabel Healthcare Inc. was founded in 2000 by Jason Maude and is named after Maude’s daughter who almost died after a potentially fatal illness was not recognized. For over 10 years, Isabel Healthcare has provided the Isabel diagnosis decision support system to hospitals, physician practices and individual physicians and gained peer reviewed validation and unmatched experience. Today, Isabel is the only diagnosis decision support system fully integrated with EMR and is used by thousands of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and students world-wide, providing diagnostic support and education by broadening their differential diagnostic considerations. Connect with us at info@isabelhealthcare.com, 734-332-0612 or www.isabelhealthcare.com or www.twitter.com/isabelhealth to learn more.

About EBSCO Publishing

EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 375 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical librarians, social workers, hospital administrators, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL^®, DynaMed^™, Nursing Reference Center^™, Patient Education Reference Center^™, Rehabilitation Reference Center^™, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source^™ and SocINDEX^™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE^®, PsycARTICLES^® and PsycINFO^®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost^®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.