Clinical

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.

Electronic health records are typically touted as providing two primary and vital services: readily accessible patient records and protection against contraindicated medications. But Intermountain Healthcare is benefiting from a growing and transformative versatility in the application of its EHRs.

Patient care teams at Yale-New Haven Hospital, looking for a faster, more efficient and more secure way to communicate with each other in the emergency room, have adopted smartphone applications to speed up workflows. The changeover from stilted clinician communications and responsiveness as a result of the hospital’s emergency room reconstruction. At certain times, different areas of the department would be closed creating confusion and making it difficult to locate personnel. In addition, the way the pediatric emergency department was logistically set up, the clinicians working there had no line of sight, making it hard for them to communicate with one another. [Also: Intermountain deploys ReadyPoint for audit compliance] Eventually, the hospital bucked its traditional methods, which included a public address system and a VOIP wireless phone system, turned to MH-CURE – for Clinical Urgent Response – a smartphone application from Waltham, Massachusetts-based Mobile Heartbeat. MH-CURE offers care teams secure, single smartphone access to all clinical communications, pertinent patient information and lab data. Care team members have a choice of using their own smartphone or sharing hospital-supplied devices. It consolidates clinical communications, including alarms and notifications, pertinent patient information, lab data, texting, voice and photography. Allen Hsiao, chief medical information officer and associate professor of pediatrics and of emergency medicine at Yale-New Haven, said adoption was easy and the staff realized early the power of having everyone on one platform. [Also: OhioHealth taps Epic's MyChart Bedside] "We choose the ED because it's as a self-contained a unit as you're going to find in a hospital," said Hsiao. "We certainly have the dynamic need of trying to find the right nurse, the right physician, at the right time, they are often in different rooms out of sight." So far, he said, the impact has been positive. "We're saving a lot of time. We used to play phone tag, used to get interrupted taking care of patients, having to step out to take a call or answering an overhead page. It's giving us back time with the patient at the bedside." Hsiao said that if a doctor or nurse gets a text, they can glance at it very quickly without leaving the patient and they can decide whether or not they need to step away or if it can wait and continue to do what they were doing with the patient. In addition, their train of thought and conversation with the patient is not interrupted. "Unlike a traditional text message I can see if another physician or nurse has read my text or not – they can tell if I read it or if it’s been delivered and not read yet," he said. "That helps a great deal. Then I know if they haven't read it and it's urgent, I can escalate with a phone call." Hsiao said that with traditional text or pager you have no way of knowing if the receiving person read a text or not. For example, if a lab sends critical lab alerts, instead of playing phone tag the alert is automated – so when something is critical, needs intervention right away, as soon as the result is back the text gets triggered right to a smartphone. Hsiao said the effect on patient care has been positive. "It cuts down on the delays between awareness of information and actual treatment." Hsiao said adoption has been driven by the flexibility of the platform, such as the ability to use an Android or iPhone device, and integration with the electronic health record. "All these features add to the functionality and the importance of the technology so it becomes a secure HIPAA-compliant ecosystem for clinical tools, that is the wave of the future," he said. According to a Mobile Heartbeat, an outside consulting firm conducted a study, before and after the MH-CURE implementation, to determine how long it took for the clinicians in the emergency departments to communicate with one another. Results revealed that the amount of time required for clinicians to locate and transmit information to one another was greatly reduced, allowing staff to spend more time with patients and thus provide better patient care. In a poll of clinicians, 75 percent said they now found it easy or very easy to communicate with colleagues with MH-Cure; just 24 percent felt that way prior to using it. Nearly 75 percent, meanwhile, reported that MH-CURE has improved patient workflow and patient safety. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] James Webb, vice president of strategic accounts for Mobile Heartbeat, said that the market for this smartphone technology is growing because secure texting is a major driver. "What we're seeing at MobileHeart beat is that people do not want to lock in to just a secure text solution, they want a full communications package, clinical workflows and inputs and alerts from various systems in the hospital," said Webb. "We see a lot of sites looking at their mobility strategy and really the major thing for their apps is they have to be able to play well together." Hsiao said that in addition to the adult and pediatric ED the smartphone app is now being deployed in its medical and surgical departments – and recently in intensive care units and emergency departments – at all of Yale's other hospital campuses, including the main campus in New Haven. Twitter: @HealthITNews

Analytics functionality has improved measurably in recent years, according to Chilmark Research, but  workflow integration remains a key hurdle.