Today’s EHR and HIT news includes two seperate partnership news items from Entrada and Summit Security Group, as well as an update from Huntzinger Management Group on their role in assisting Mt. Ascutney Hospital attest to Stage 1 Meaningful Use.
Entrada Announces Partnership with athenahealth
Entrada today announced a corporate partnership with athenahealth, a leading provider of cloud-based practice management, electronic health record, and care coordination services to medical groups. The agreement provides a roadmap to improve the integration between the voice-centric workflow solutions offered by Entrada and athenahealth’s cloud-based electronic medical records and practice management services, with the objective of seamlessly making Entrada’s voice services available to athenahealth’s 35,000-strong health provider client base. The partnership also enables athenahealth to offer Entrada’s clinical documentation technology to its current and future clients.
Entrada provides a dictation solution for every workflow, whether in single or multi-specialty environments. Entrada’s fully-integrated desktop and mobile solution, available for all Apple iOS and Windows PC devices, syncs with the athenaCollector® practice management system to build a daily worklist. A physician then simply dictates a note, and Entrada automates the text conversion and editing and inserts the finished note back into individual text fields within the athenaClinicals® EHR system.
“We believe Entrada is a game changer in the mobile healthcare industry, providing users a level of flexibility and ease-of-use that has largely been absent in health care IT,” noted Jonathan Bush, Chairman and CEO of athenahealth. “This partnership with Entrada provides our customers a traditional, dictation-based option, enabling physicians to keep their productivity high, and get back to why they practiced medicine in the first place: patient care.”
Entrada has been an early collaborator and participant in athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please,” an initiative launched to create and foster a community of entrepreneurs, big thinkers, investors, engineers and academics who share a goal of accelerating disruptive innovation in health care.
Summit Security Group Signs Exclusive Partnership
Summit Security Group, LLC and OCHIN, Inc. have signed an exclusive partnership to support OCHIN members’ compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Security Rule and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Summit will provide technical information security advisory services to help OCHIN member organizations in 14 states meet federal information security requirements. The HIPAA Security Rule and the HITECH Act lay out stringent requirements for how providers and health centers of all sizes protect the electronic health information of their patients.
Summit’s unique expertise in health care regulation and information security meets the diverse needs of OCHIN members, who use electronic health record (EHR) technology to keep patients’ medical information accurate, accessible and protected. ”Health care is a complex industry, and our professionals are on the front lines of managing technology risk and compliance in organizations large and small,” said Summit Managing Director Daniel Briley. “We’re thrilled to be able to help OCHIN members with the information security challenges of their individual organizations.” Though HIPAA and HITECH Act regulations are specific, Summit understands that implementing efficient security compliance is a different challenge at each organization and requires fine tuning best practices to each environment.
OCHIN, a nonprofit collaborative, is one of the nation’s largest health information networks and includes Oregon Health & Science University, Pacific University, Multnomah County Health Department and Clackamas County Public Health Department. Its members work together on information technology and optimized practice management to offer patients better care supported by efficient and secure EHR solutions.
Huntzinger Management Group Plays Major Role in Assisting Mt. Ascutney Hospital Attest to Stage 1 Meaningful Use
Healthcare advisory and managed services consultancy, the Huntzinger Management Group, Inc. (HMG) has successfully facilitated the implementation of Cerner Millennium EMR at Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center in Windsor, VT. HMG managed the project, which came to fruition in September, 2012.
“Without HMG, we would not have been able to go live when we did, nor would we have been as effective or efficient in such a timely, successful implementation,” said Kevin Donovan, CEO of Mt. Ascutney. “This is a critical initiative for us this year to receive Meaningful Use incentives allowing us to enhance our service offerings benefitting the community.”
“HMG works with all kinds of health care organizations and we are pleased with the success of the implementation that put them on a path to Meaningful Use and providing higher quality care,” said Robert Kitts, Executive Vice President and Director at HMG.
HMG provides advisory and managed services consulting to healthcare organizations across the country, focusing on clinical and operational business performance optimization by ensuring alignment between IT, clinical, and ambulatory areas to position healthcare organizations for the future. It is because of this guidance and project management expertise that Mt. Ascutney is able to attest to Stage 1 Meaningful Use this fall.
iSALUS Healthcare has announced that Novia CareClinics (yes – that is the way they spell their name) has chosen OfficeEMR in its nationwide expansion effort to support Novia’s mission to drive down employer benefit plan costs while providing improved benefits to employees and their families.
Novia CareClinics provides primary care services for large employers to promote the health and well-being of their employees by creating and managing employer sponsored on-site medical clinics. In doing so, large employers are able to combat the rising costs of medical benefits in today’s healthcare market. In an effort to contain costs with their national growth trajectory, OfficeEMR provided a cost effective solution with clinical expertise and in-depth data analytics.
“After completing a laborious and thorough investigation, our management as well as our IT team members found the cloud-based OfficeEMR best able to meet our clinical and business needs,” said Todd Foushee, executive vice president and chief operations officer of Novia CareClinics. “As an added benefit, we found the collective team at iSALUS to be engaging and willing to collaborate in order to meet and exceed our expectations.”
Nationally, the trend by employers is to provide greater fiscal responsibility to employees and shareholders to contain the rising costs of health care benefits. Recognizing this trend, Novia CareClinics continues to forecast year-over-year growth, and required the mobility, scalability and cost effectiveness of a web-based EMR. As a fully-unified system in the cloud, OfficeEMR perfectly complements the existing on-site clinics as well as the forthcoming growth at Novia CareClinics as they continue to add additional providers and users. Additionally, the clinicians at Novia CareClinics called for a simple to use software that maintains the focus on providing greater patient care. The speed and simplicity of OfficeEMR provided the right solution in the mission of productive healthcare at Novia CareClinics.
“We are thrilled to be in partnership with Novia CareClinics to help deliver more cost effective care to large employers throughout the United States. Our vision with OfficeEMR continues to be centered on participating with such mission critical organizations to better manage clinical information in order to improve care and cost effective outcomes,” said Michael H. Hall, president and chief executive officer at iSALUS.
The organizations have already begun initial training and implementation efforts, and expect the rollout to be completed over the next few months.
