Industry Insight

Healthcare Innovative Solutions Partners With Misys

Healthcare Innovative Solutions, a full-service clinical consulting firm, recently announced a partnership with Misys Open Source Solutions to provide the healthcare community with the consultancy services and open source technology necessary to build health information exchanges (HIEs).

“HIEs are important because they provide the healthcare community with immediate access to patient data coming from many different sources, like labs, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, radiology centers, and payers, giving healthcare providers the essential information to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare in America today,” says Tim Elwell, vice president of Misys Open Source Solutions–Healthcare.

“A close examination of the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] funding and resulting healthcare provider incentive payments also places the need to exchange patient information between individual providers and institutions at a critical level. Health information exchanges will help communities demonstrate the forthcoming ‘meaningful use’ requirements,” Elwell continues.

HIEs are essential components in President Obama’s plan to provide access to an EHR for all U.S. citizens by 2014. Without a way to transfer records electronically, the efficiencies, cost savings, and improved patient care won’t be realized. HIEs make the transfer of the electronic records possible.

— Source: Healthcare Innovative Solutions

Randy Olver Named Emdat CEO

Emdat, which specializes in online-based medical transcription, has tapped Randy Olver as its new CEO.

Olver, a commercial banking veteran who joined Emdat in February as a vice president, says the coming years present a significant opportunity for the medical transcription industry. He says growth in EMR adoption and federal mandates make it more important than ever for medical notes and dictations to be integrated quickly and accurately.

Olver, a resident of Whitefish Bay, Wis., worked at U.S. Bank for 17 years and was most recently a senior vice president managing Milwaukee’s National Corporate Banking group.

— Source: Emdat, Inc

HL7 Introduces New EHR Standard

Health Level Seven (HL7) has announced the publication of the healthcare industry’s first American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-approved standard that specifies the functional requirements for regulated clinical research in an EHR system. The HL7 EHR Clinical Research Functional Profile for EHR systems is based on the HL7 EHR Work Group’s EHR System Functional Model Release 1, which is also ANSI approved.

The profile defines high-level requirements critical for using EHR data for regulated clinical research and provides a road map for integrating the information environment that must support both the patient care and the downstream clinical research processes.

Pharmaceutical, biotechnology, clinical research technology vendor, healthcare technology vendor, and federal regulatory stakeholders from the United States and the European Union collaborated for two years to identify and address a broad list of data protection, regulatory, and ethical research requirements. The EHR Clinical Research Functional Profile is also a resource for the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology Clinical Research Work Group as it defines new clinical research certification criteria for EHR systems.

This functional profile will be complemented by the EHR-Clinical Research interoperability specification currently being developed by the Health Information Technology Standards Panel.

— Source: Health Level Seven, Inc

NCRA Welcomes Newly Certified CTRs

The National Cancer Registrars Association’s Council on Certification has announced the recent addition of newly certified professionals. In September, 143 candidates successfully completed a comprehensive examination on principles of cancer registry management, cancer data coding, and abstracting. As a result of their successful completion, they were awarded the CTR credential by the NCRA’s Council on Certification. They join more than 4,500 CTRs worldwide who have attained this credentialing achievement.

— Source: National Cancer Registrars Association

AHDI President Susan Lucci Joins Webmedx

Webmedx, a U.S. medical transcription service provider and a supplier of clinical documentation technology, recently announced the appointment of Susan Lucci, RHIT, CMT, AHDI-F, to the position of vice president of field operations. With 25 years of experience in HIM and medical transcription, Lucci assumes national leadership responsibility for day-to-day customer operations alongside the delivery of new technology and service capabilities to those customers.

In addition to her Webmedx responsibilities, Lucci continues to serve as the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity’s 2009 president and acting board member through 2010.

Prior to joining Webmedx, Lucci held vice president and director positions with other medical transcription companies and served as assistant HIM director and clinical coder for two healthcare provider organizations.

— Source: Webmedx