Clinical

More than 100 member organizations have committed to participating in the effort to empower patients and improve care delivery.

The federal government is pursuing a fistful of bold visions to transform healthcare including the Precision Medicine Initiative and the National Cancer Moonshot, and for those to succeed patients are going to need the ability to access and share health data in new ways, according to three federal officials. “When patients are engaged in research and voluntarily sharing their health data with the research community, the opportunities for new discoveries at the intersection of human biology, behavior, genetics, and data science are unlimited,” wrote U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil, Senior Advisor Claudia Williams and Precision Medicine Initiative project manager Stephanie Devaney. [Also: Obama taps Biden to lead cancer cure 'moonshot'] The authors cited President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, an innovative approach that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles in treatment and research, and the National Cancer Moonshot, which leverages Big Data to find solutions to genetic abnormalities, as examples of data sharing to accelerate research and translate findings into new treatments. HHS has been taking steps to enable the data sharing that PMI, the Cancer Moonshot, and key research projects will demand. The agency recently issued guidance to clarify patient rights to access a variety of health information, including personal health records, the information in their health records, clinical laboratory test results, and genetic data. And earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration held a workshop with patients and providers to understand the best ways to return information that is usable, meaningful, and actionable. “We’ve worked hand-in-hand with the private sector (to provide patient access to health records) and together, last week, the companies that provide 90 percent of electronic health records to hospitals nationwide pledged to improve the flow of data across healthcare settings, provide people with easy and secure access to their information, and adhere to federally recognized standards that assure that patients can access their own data,” the authors explained. HHS is also encouraging the development of apps that use open, standardized application programming interfaces to help consumers aggregate their health information in one place that is under their control. And at the recent Precision Medicine Initiative Summit hosted by President Obama at the White House, six of the major electronic health record vendors announced that they will pilot the use of standard APIs for individuals to access and contribute their data to research. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] The authors also pointed to the early traction Blue Button has gotten. Through the public-private effort some 150 million Americans can now access information from providers, medical laboratories, retail pharmacy chains, and state immunization registries. What’s more, three million veterans, service members, and Medicare beneficiaries have now accessed their personal health data more than 43 million times. “These are exciting steps toward ensuring individuals have access to their data,” Patil, Williams and Devaney wrote. “But we’re far from done.” Twitter: @HealthITNews

Experts say healthcare providers need to turn up the pressure on tech vendors to create more intuitive products.

The Mississippi Division of Medicaid is being touted as the first Medicaid agency in the country to send and receive clinical data in real-time with a health system using an Epic electronic health record. The exchange, powered by data analytics company MedeAnalytics, was with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, in Jackson, the state's biggest Medicaid provider. "Giving doctors and nurses access to important information such as medications, diagnoses and allergies ensures that they can make the best care decisions for Medicaid patients," said John Showalter, MD, chief health information officer of UMMC, in a statement. [Also: Judy Faulkner says 'Good software is art'] MedeAnalytics first helped the Mississippi Division of Medicaid with the groundwork by creating an enterprise master patient index and single patient identifier in 2014. To do so, the company analyzed and de-duplicated records from 2.3 million Medicaid beneficiaries. The medical records had been collected over more than a decade. Today, the Medicaid division and UMMC can share Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture patient summaries through UMMC's Epic EHR. MedeAnalytics expects it will receive about 3,500 clinical inquiries per day from UMMC. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] MedeAnalytics points to several benefits of real-time access, including emergency room care due to a more complete patient record, improved case management since Medicaid utilization and remaining benefits are able to be quickly accessed, and better care management since immunization records and alerts help ensure more up-to-date care. Twitter: @HealthITNews

LAS VEGAS – American HealthTech has partnered with Medtelligent to offer owners and managers of senior care facilities a new care and management system. The Assisted Living Solution is designed to help providers navigate the technology challenges of caring for seniors who move across the spectrum of care from assisted living to skilled nursing facilities and other provider organizations. The combination of American HealthTech’s skilled nursing electronic health records system and Medtelligent’s Assisted Living offering will be especially beneficial to the fast-growing sector of continuing care retirement communities, said the vendors, who announced the partnership at the 2016 Annual HIMSS Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas. Post-acute organization owners and managers can use the combined technologies to provide accurate, detailed electronic care records for seniors as they move among assisted living, skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, rehabilitation centers and other organizations, the vendors said. Further, the combined technologies can provide financial management and workflow tools for all post-acute senior care facilities, the vendors said. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] American HealthTech has more than 3,300 skilled nursing facilities as clients while Medtelligent specializes in the assisted living industry and operates in 31 states, the vendors said. "The senior care landscape is challenging facility owners, with changing ownership models, shifting reimbursement models and the aging of America’s population," said American HealthTech president Teresa Chase. "The Medtelligent products add strength to our American HealthTech solutions and give our clients superior clinical and financial management tools across a wider landscape of care facilities." The two companies’ products blend well across care settings because of American HealthTech’s strength in skilled nursing and Medtelligent’s experience in the assisted living and memory care industries, said John Shafaee, Medtelligent’s CEO. "The big trends in our industry are upon us like a tsunami," said Chase, pointing out that in two years, 50 percent of Medicare payments will be based on quality and value of care. She added that by 2030, one of every five U.S. residents will be 65 or older and 2.3 percent of the population will be 85 or older. "Already, the 85-plus segment is the fastest growing population in the country. These trends are unstoppable, and this business partnership will help facility owners manage them." Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

LAS VEGAS – Secure, personalized clinical desktop technology vendor Aventura announced Wednesday at HIMSS16 that it is partnering with HealthCast to bring HealthCast’s single sign-on technology to Aventura’s clinical desktop offering. The combination enables basic level desktop perimeter security and two-factor authentication with the ability to leverage single sign-on and contextual patient awareness for interoperability at the point of care, Aventura said. Aventura’s so-called “situational awareness” platform, Sympatica, uses ambient knowledge of who a user is, her location and the patient in her care to authenticate and provide access to an electronic health records system. HealthCast’s SSO Connectors will be integrated into the Sympatica platform to deliver fast and secure access to an organization’s EHR and multiple clinical applications, the vendors announced. [Also: See photos from Day 3 of HIMSS16] “Our partnership with HealthCast includes a growing library of more than 325 SSO connectors,” said John Gobron, CEO of Aventura. “By pre-integrating with Sympatica, customers will have optionality in their security strategy, including the ability to leverage SSO without the complexity and costs commonly associated with other access solutions.” Aventura and HealthCast are exhibiting at the 2016 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition, Aventura in booth #1324 and HealthCast in booth #6054. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

McKesson is expanding its footprint in the oncology field with a combined $1.2 billion acquisition of two companies – Vantage Oncology and Biologics.

Nuance will unveil its Dragon Medical One Platform at HIMSS16, an evolution of its speech recognition and documentation tool that aims to redefine the relationship clinical users have with healthcare technology, the company says. According to Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance's director of cloud and mobile solutions marketing, increasing demands on physicians – not least the number of places they need to be and IT systems with which they're supposed to interact – has changed the equation, putting a premium on flexibility and mobility. Nuance touts its new cloud-based Dragon Medical One platform as a tool to offer physicians a unified speech recognition functionality – irrespective of care settings, workflows, devices or applications. The new version brings analytics functionality that keep tabs on the time spent documenting, helping health organizations track efficiency and productivity. Additionally, workflow enhancements such as Dragon Medical Advisor offer notes to help improve ICD-10 specificity, case mix index and more.  A pair of new features, PowerPack and PowerMic Mobile, enable users to tap into evidence-based content using a smartphone as a secure microphone to dictate, edit and navigate the EHR on any workstation. Whether they are dictating into EHRs or mobile messaging apps, the Dragon Medical One desktop app offers secure speech recognition wherever physicians need to document. With a unique Nuance Healthcare ID, doctors gain access to an ecosystem of personalized tools. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "We are always interested in technology that improves productivity, and cloud-based speech supports the ways physicians work and eases the effort of entering clinical documentation into patient records," said Don Fosen, director of IT at Naperville, Illinois-based Edward-Elmhurst Hospital, in a prepared statement, noting that the tools "have let us scale voice recognition in a way that we simply couldn't have done in any other way." Nuance’s Dreyer added that the vendor has been seeing a shift in doctors’ workflow.  "There's a general trend of physicians being in more places, having to interact with not just the EHR but with other technologies as part of their daily workflow," Dreyer said.  Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

IBM executives say the purchase adds not only a massive repository of health data to the Watson Health Cloud, but also an extensive client roster to IBM's Watson Health unit.

Only a few days remain to submit speaker and session proposals for the Healthcare IT News and HIMSS Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum, which will be held in San Francisco June 14 and 15.