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Carrier Access, Inc. Honored to Join the CHIME Foundation
DECEMBER 16, 2019 – Carrier Access, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has become a member of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Foundation. As a CHIME Foundation member firm, Carrier Access, Inc. will play a vital role in CHIME’s continuing education efforts and have opportunities to interact with leading healthcare executives and thought leaders.
“We are excited about our membership with an organization like CHIME,” said Shane Stark, Vice President of Vendor Relations.“Joining CHIME is an important next step for Carrier Access, Inc., to collaborate with healthcare organizations across the nation. By sharing our insights into technologies like 5G connectivity, carrier connectivity to support Cloud initiatives, data exchange and Telehealth, we feel we can make a positive impact. But most importantly, ensuring the associated connectivity expenses are properly managed.”
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Foundation is a non-profit organization composed of select healthcare IT companies and professional services firms. CHIME Foundation members benefit from the unique opportunity to partner and collaborate with CHIME member chief information officers. The CHIME Foundation provides and participates in educational initiatives and programs that serve the professional development needs of CHIME and CHIME Foundation members. These initiatives and partnerships advance the strategic and innovative applications of healthcare information technology.
About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers (CIOs), chief medical information offices (CMIOs), chief nursing information officers (CNIOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 3,100 members in 51 countries and over 150 healthcare IT companies 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 chimecentral.org.
Posted 12.16.2019 -
Education Foundation Offers Scholarships for Spring Forum, Boot Camp
12.12.2019
Rose Lucas, Executive Assistant, Foundation
The CHIME Education Foundation is accepting scholarship applications to assist members who want to attend either the CHIME HIMSS CIO Forum in Orlando, Fla., or the CHIME Healthcare CIO Boot Camp in Chicago. The deadlines for applying are Jan. 6 and Feb. 9, respectively.
The CHIME HIMSS CIO Forum will be held March 8-9 in Orlando. The Education Foundation is offering a total of five $1,500 scholarships to current members. Each scholarship recipient will get a complimentary registration to the spring forum and, at the conclusion of the event, be able to submit some travel expenses for reimbursement.
Applicants for the spring forum scholarships must submit an essay and current resume to be considered. More information and the application forms are available here. The application deadline is Jan. 6.
In addition, two $1,500 scholarships are available to CHIME members through the Neal L. Patterson Community and Rural Hospital Scholarship. This Cerner-endowed scholarship is intended for CIOs who’ve made a significant impact in community and rural hospitals. More details and the application form are available here. The application deadline is also Jan. 6.
The CHIME Healthcare CIO Boot Camp will take place April 18-21 in Chicago. The Education Foundation will award up to 10 scholarships, each worth $5,000. Current CHIME members, their direct reports and members of AEHIA, AEHIS and AEHIT are eligible to apply. The scholarships cover the full tuition fee for attending the boot camp and, at the conclusion of the event, recipients will be able to submit some travel expenses for reimbursement.
Applicants for spring boot camp scholarships must submit an essay, a current resume and in some circumstances, a letter of support. More information and application forms are available here. The application deadline is Feb. 9.
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Posted 12.12.2019 -
How to Make a Go-Live Go Smoothly: Q&A with The HCI Group’s Chris Belmont
12.12.19
By Candace Stuart, Director, Communications & Public Relations
Chris Belmont oversaw two Epic go-lives as CIO at Ochsner Health System and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Now executive vice president of operations and strategy at The HCI Group: A Tech Mahindra Company, his career has included positions with Siemens, IBM and Healthlink. He recently talked with CHIME about lessons learned and trends in the industry. This is the first of a two-part Q&A. It has been edited for length.
Q: What lessons did you learn through your Ochsner go-live that you applied to MD Anderson?
A: I learned that you have to sweat the small stuff. Little things matter. It is a long journey; it is typically 3-5 years from the time you think about making a change to the contract signing to the building and implementation to the point where things have stabilized.
The most predictable parts of the project, in my opinion, are the big pieces: the build of the system, the methodologies work and the technology. Then there is the small stuff: How do you manage the project? How do you manage scope creep? There are a thousand things you have to think about during the go-live day. Any one of those can disrupt years of work. That was the best lesson learned for me.
Q: Can you actually recognize the small stuff at that point?
You can but you have to be intentional about it. You have to sit down and go through some scenarios. Play “what-if’s” and look at it from many perspectives. Take the command center, for example, if you need to feed the troops. You need to have a constant flow of food and if your go-live is in the middle of the night or weekend, maybe food services at your organization is not fully staffed to support those hours so you must engage with them. Getting your food services team to be part of the project is invaluable. In both situations, our facilities and food services teams stepped up in a big way. They rallied around the project even though it didn’t directly impact them.
Do you have enough power? All of a sudden you have a command center with 100 people in one room. Will the power handle that? Can you get enough phones in there? Can you get enough network coverage? We also learned to load test everything. The volume of activities in the first few days and weeks will spike.
There will be a large influx of people supporting the go-live. How do you get people in and out when you have a shift change? At MD Anderson we had a thousand support folks, maybe 400 per shift, for example. How do you get 400 in and 400 out without disrupting normal hospital operations, especially at a cancer center?
The fatigue of your team is another one. The EMR team will sprint to the starting line. You worked long hours to get the system built, tested and ready for production and when you turn it on your team needs to be at their peak performance. If your team is fatigued or you didn’t intentionally manage their hours, then you have a team who is burned out when you need them to be at the top of their game.
Q: Did you learn those lessons specifically at Ochsner?
A: Ochsner was the first very large project where it was a full EMR, but in my career with Siemens, IBM and Healthlink I probably did 40 major EMRs or large departmental system installs over my 30-plus years in healthcare IT. Definitely not as big as Ochsner but you still have the same issues on a smaller scale. I have done a lot of different command centers, go-lives and builds. Many things are similar but they all have their unique nuances.
You have to make tough decisions like what data do you migrate to the new system. Do you really need medical record No. 1 in Epic when they were a patient 50-plus years ago and you don’t really have any digital records? There are things like that that you need to think through. There is no right or wrong decision. You just need to have an educated discussion with all of the stakeholders.
The doctor says, ‘I need every lab result ever in the new system.’ For some specialties like cancer, probably, but for primary care, do I really need my blood results from 30 years ago? If you ask users what they want, they will say everything. You have to sit down with them and ask, ‘What is important to you?’ It typically is two or three years of data in the active system and access to the historical data in an archive. These decisions must be balanced against the effort and cost. It may be more difficult and costly to filter the data than to move it all.
Q: How about the data quality itself?
A: That is the biggest challenge. It may not map one for one. When you build your new system, you have the opportunity to revisit, standardize and update some of the critical values, ranges, prices, order set and so on. While some of this may be valuable effort, make sure it is managed closely. Some of these projects are major efforts and change management challenges themselves. The good news is this process has been refined over the last decade and the data migration effort is much more predictable and based on the experiences of others.
On the flip side, you must think about the use of the data down the road. At MD Anderson, we quickly realized we were building a system that would support clinical operations and standards of care but with a little more effort we could turn it into a strong research data collection tool. For example, the diagnosis and other clinical information may be appropriate for care or billing. But did we have enough granularity to know specific cancers, specific stages? Could we make that available for the research community by collecting it in the EMR in the normal patient flow?
Look bigger and broader and institutional. We adopted a “data first strategy” and built our system with that in mind. Not just is it good for billing, clinical care, research, operations and reporting? Do we have enough detail for scheduling optimization or is the metadata there to look at staff productivity and so on? Is it accessible and consistent with the enterprise analytics strategy?
It is a transformation you are going through, not purely an Epic implementation. You will never have the opportunity, probably ever again – hopefully – to do a project of that magnitude that impacts literally everybody in the organization all the time. Don’t overdo it, don’t over engineer it or take too long. Be aggressive but smart about what you are doing. Be careful with the amount of change you introduce.
Q: How do you keep the momentum going?
A: It is very cyclical. A member of the board at Ochsner asked me what the biggest concern I had about the project and I said communication and change management. Probably the most valuable resource that I brought onto the project was a dedicated communication resource. There is a steady drumbeat that you have to maintain over the lifecycle of the project. It can’t be communications for communications sake; it has to keep the project relevant and in everyone’s mind.
You must be aware of where you are in the project lifecycle. For example, when we were in the middle of the build and were far enough along that the system was somewhat presentable yet still a year or so away, it was time to get the organization back engaged. We held a couple of demo fairs in public areas. What was nice about that is they got to see their friends, the MD Anderson or Ochsner employees showing them an MD Anderson or Ochsner system. It was not an Epic demo done by Epic people.
That was the launch to the go-live, months ahead of the actual go-live date. People realized that, ‘Wow, this is really happening. This is our system.’ There were booths where they could see different system features and function. If you were a radiologist there was a radiology booth. There was an admission and registration booth, a nursing booth and a physician booth. They could see how the system would impact their role in the organization.
We started getting the momentum and level of excitement back up. In my experience, over the long period while the system is being built, you want to keep the project in everyone’s mind but not overdo it. At about 180 days before the go-live you want to ramp up the awareness and focus. That is when you start giving the system to the users through testing and validation. That is when you need to get the user community heavily involved. You want them to actively participate in training, building preferences, practicing in the sand box and participating in the go-live. You can never communicate enough in my opinion. The more you do prior to the go-live, the shorter the stabilization and adoption period will be.
Our go-lives were successful because we did that work. We adopted a mantra, and we still use it today at HCI: We do it with our users and not to our users.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series. The second article will appear in an upcoming issue of Inside CHIME.
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Posted 12.12.2019 -
News of Note
12.12.19
By Candace Stuart, Director, Communications & Public Relations
Opioid Task Force will host an Emerald Foundation webinar: CHIME and the CHIME Opioid Task Force are hosting a free and open webinar at noon ET on Tuesday, Dec. 17. The webinar is titled “How the Emerald Foundation Simplifies Finding Substance Use Disorder Treatment Options.” To attend, register here.
Olympian and author John K. Coyle will speak at the spring forum: John K. Coyle, an Olympic speedskating silver medalist, bestselling author and a thought leader in the field of chronoception (the study of how humans process time), will be a keynote speaker at the 2020 CHIME HIMSS CIO Forum in Orlando, Fla. More information about Coyle is available here. To register for the forum, go here.
CHIME members dominate Becker’s women CIO list: Nineteen of the 20 leaders named on Becker’s “Women CIOs of Hospitals and Health Systems to Know” list are members of CHIME. Access the list here.
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Posted 12.12.2019 -
CHIME Offers a Chance to Earn Security Credentials
12.12.2019
Ashley Jester – Director, Professional Development
Cybersecurity remains a top concern for most healthcare IT executives. To help CHIME members and their security teams strengthen their skills, knowledge and networks, CHIME is offering several new security-focused resources. New this fall, CHIME and the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security (AEHIS) introduced certification for healthcare information security leaders, the Certified Healthcare Information Security Leader (CHISL) Program.
A committee made up of CHIME, AEHIS and AEHIS Foundation professionals worked intently to develop a program and sound examination that would test the technical proficiency, tactical knowledge and forward-thinking leadership that a leader in healthcare information security should maintain. This program was developed very similarly to the Certified Healthcare CIO (CHCIO) Program designed for healthcare CIOs and executives.
We strongly encourage your healthcare security leaders to join AEHIS and take advantage of this opportunity to grow professionally and stay connected to all things healthcare security driven. That includes access to security-focused educational programs, resources, networking opportunities and more. Security leaders within your organization can enroll into the CHISL Program to earn CHISL certification and be recognized as evolving leaders in healthcare information security.
To learn more about AEHIS membership and the CHISL Program, please visit aehis.org/chisl.
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Posted 12.12.2019 -
CynergisTek Reboots Go-To-Market Leadership Team
Former Symantec Executive Tony Douglas to Lead Sales, Leveraging Decades of Healthcare and Security Expertise
Austin, TX, December 10, 2019— CynergisTek, Inc. (NYSE AMERICAN: CTEK, a leader in cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance, today announced that it has appointed Tony Douglas as its senior vice president of sales. In this role, Douglas will build and lead CynergisTek’s business development and sales strategy. Douglas brings to the team nearly two decades of proven sales achievements and technical leadership in both the healthcare IT and security industries.
Prior to joining CynergisTek, Douglas held multiple leadership positions at Symantec Corporation, a Fortune 500 information security software and services provider, most recently leading as its vice president of healthcare sales. During his tenure, he played an increasingly integral role in developing and executing on the go-to-market strategy for the healthcare business, which consistently delivered double-digit growth and routinely exceeded the annual plan. Prior to Symantec Corporation, Douglas held technical, project management, and commercial roles at organizations including McKesson Provider Technologies and Carestream Health.
“I am passionate about the intersection between security and healthcare and I believe that we need to give patients the same level of trust and confidence with their data as they have with their clinicians,” said Douglas. “When the opportunity arose to join one of the top security and privacy firms in the healthcare, I was all in.”
“As we looked for a sales leader that could lead the next phase of CynergisTek’s revenue growth, we wanted to find someone that could swim in three lanes – an accomplished salesperson, a security professional, and a leader with the contacts, reputation, and knowledge of the healthcare industry,” said Caleb Barlow, CEO of CynergisTek. “Douglas can swim in all three lanes and he has a proven track record of growing revenue and building sales teams that can scale.”
Douglas’s hire comes on the heels of the recent appointment of Benjamin Denkers, senior vice president of security and privacy services, and the acquisition of Backbone Consultants with their three partners – Nikhil D’Souza, Jacob Carroll, and Walter Zuniga.
About CynergisTek, Inc.
CynergisTek is a top-ranked cybersecurity firm dedicated to serving the information assurance needs of the healthcare industry. CynergisTek offers specialized services and solutions to help organizations achieve privacy, security, and compliance goals. Since 2004, the company has served as a partner to hundreds of healthcare organizations and is dedicated to supporting and educating the industry by contributing to relevant industry associations. The company has been recognized by KLAS as a top performing firm in healthcare cybersecurity and was awarded the 2019 Top Healthcare Cybersecurity Consults in Black Book IT Advisory Outcomes Survey.
Forward-Looking Statements
This release contains certain forward-looking statements relating to the business of CynergisTek that can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “believes,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “may” or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including uncertainties relating to product/service development, long and uncertain sales cycles, the ability to obtain or maintain patent or other proprietary intellectual property protection, market acceptance, future capital requirements, competition from other providers, the ability of our vendors to continue supplying the company with equipment, parts, supplies and services at comparable terms and prices and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from those described herein as anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Certain of these risks and uncertainties are or will be described in greater detail in our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at http://www.sec.gov. CynergisTek is under no obligation (and expressly disclaims any such obligation) to update or alter its forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Investor Relations Contact:
CynergisTek, Inc.
Bryan Flynn
(949) 382-1419
[email protected]Media Contact:
Aria Marketing
Danielle Johns
(617) 332-9999 x241
[email protected]Posted 12.10.2019 -
Clearwater Debuts Best-in-Class Business Associates Cyber Risk Management and HIPAA Compliance Program
The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates Provides Customers with Expert Guidance and Purpose-Built Software Tools to Protect Patient Data
NASHVILLE, TN (Dec. 3, 2019) – Clearwater today announced The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates, a special offering from the healthcare cybersecurity solutions provider, enabling its customers to implement and mature a best-in-class cyber risk management and HIPAA compliance program. Clearwater developed The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates in recognition of the need for the partner organizations that interact with the electronic protected health information (ePHI) maintained by healthcare providers to strengthen their ability to keep the information secure.
The spotlight recently shone bright on just how important such programs are to companies deemed “business associates” under the federal HIPAA law when news surfaced of the Google- Ascension Health collaboration dubbed “Project Nightingale”. When health systems and providers work with technology and other vendor partners, the first thing they want to know is what those partners are doing to protect the exchange of personal health data.
“Business Associates, as they are classified under HIPAA, play a vital role in the U.S. healthcare system, providing innovative solutions that advance the way care is accessed, delivered, managed, and paid for,” said Clearwater CEO Steve Cagle. “Through The Clear Advantage Program, we are helping ensure that concerns over the security of new solutions don’t stifle innovation. Our best-in-class offering provides a distinct competitive advantage to our customers, broadening their value propositions by instilling trust with existing and prospective partners and demonstrating they’re serious about being good stewards of patient information.”
Cyber attacks, projected to cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion in 2019 alone, have hit the healthcare industry especially hard over the past several years due to the increasing availability and high value of healthcare data. In addition to costs incurred from breach-related lawsuits, addressing vulnerabilities, and loss of patient trust, The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been actively issuing fines to organizations that have failed to take steps to prevent a breach. As providers are ultimately responsible for protecting patient data, they must ensure their partners’ information systems are adequately secured.
As the leading provider of enterprise cyber risk management software and consulting services for healthcare organizations, Clearwater drew on its intimate understanding of the information security needs and requirements of providers to develop The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates. Uber Health is one of the non-health system customers to recognize the value of Clearwater’s expertise, engaging the company to help ensure its systems and infrastructure are secure and fully compliant with healthcare industry standards. Watch this video to see how Clearwater is helping Uber Health and another health tech innovator Digital Reasoning know and address their cybersecurity risks.
As an outgrowth of that work, Clearwater developed The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates, which provides all the elements entities that serve provider organizations need to build and mature a strong cyber risk management and HIPAA compliance capability, including:
- Leadership from an experienced Virtual Chief Information Security Officer and/or Chief Privacy Officer where needed
- Subscription to Clearwater’s IRM|Pro® Enterprise Cyber Risk Management Software
- Cyber risk management program development and governance
- HIPAA policy and procedure development and workforce training
- Annual security risk analyses and compliance assessments
- Ongoing compliance gap and risk remediation
- Quarterly vulnerability scans and monitoring
- Annual penetration testing
- Assistance responding to provider security assessments
To learn more about The Clear Advantage Program for Business Associates, visit https://clearwatercompliance.com/who-we-serve/business-associates/.
About Clearwater
Clearwater is the leading provider of Enterprise Cyber Risk Management and HIPAA compliance software and consulting services for the healthcare industry. Our solutions enable organizations to gain enterprise-wide visibility into cybersecurity risks and more effectively prioritize and manage them, ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Clearwater’s IRM|Pro® software and consulting services help healthcare organizations to avoid preventable breaches, protect patients, and meet OCR’s expectations, while optimizing cybersecurity investments. More than 400 healthcare organizations, including 64 of the nation’s largest health systems and a large universe of business associates that serve the industry, trust Clearwater to meet their information security needs. For more information about Clearwater, please visit www.clearwatercompliance.com.
Posted 12.6.2019 -
Protenus Named a 2019 Top Workplace in Baltimore by The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE, December 6, 2019 (Newswire.com) –Protenus, the country’s leading healthcare compliance analytics platform, has been awarded a Top Workplaces 2019 honor by The Baltimore Sun. The list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a third-party survey administered by research partner Energage, LLC, a leading provider of technology-based employee engagement tools. The anonymous survey measures several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, just to name a few.
The team at Protenus focuses on providing an exceptional experience for our customers and this naturally translates to the company’s work culture. Protenus offers a holistic approach to care for each individual by providing transparent, market-based compensation, employee stock options, healthcare premiums covered at 90% for employees and their dependents, stipends for professional development, unlimited paid time off, flexible work hours, and a casual, collaborative environment. These benefits are deeply rooted in our values and are an important part of our strategy to attract and retain great people.
“The Top Workplaces award is about much more than recognition and celebration,” said Eric Rubino, CEO of Energage. “Our research also shows that these organizations achieve higher referral rates, lower employee turnover, and double the employee engagement levels. It just goes to show that being intentional about culture delivers bottom-line results.”
“We’re proud of the culture our team has created and we actively nurture and preserve it. This includes being intentional about hiring people who are interested in contributing to our culture,” said Megan Emhoff, Chief People Officer at Protenus. “Our team invests a portion of their career with us and we’re committed to investing in each person in return by providing opportunities for people to grow and thrive professionally while providing robust benefits and promoting a meaningful quality of life. We’re humbled to be recognized by The Baltimore Sun alongside such a great group of companies.”
Protenus was ranked as a top solution in patient privacy monitoring by Black Book and KLAS Research. Protenus was also named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in Healthcare Artificial Intelligence and received the Innovation of the Year in Data Security award by Healthcare Informatics. Protenus was recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in Healthcare by Modern Healthcare in 2018 and 2019, and its co-founders, Nick Culbertson & Robert Lord, were finalists for the 2019 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Mid-Atlantic region.
About Protenus
The Protenus healthcare compliance analytics platform uses artificial intelligence to audit every access to patient records for the nation’s leading health systems. Providing healthcare leaders full insight into how health data is being used, and alerting privacy, security and compliance teams to inappropriate activity, Protenus helps our partner hospitals make decisions about how to better protect their data, their patients, and their institutions. Learn more at Protenus.com and follow us on Twitter @Protenus.
About Energage, LLC
Headquartered in Exton, Pa., Energage is a leading provider of technology-based employee engagement tools that help leaders to unlock potential, inspire performance, and achieve amazing results within their organizations. The research partner behind the Top Workplaces program, Energage has surveyed more than 58,000 organizations representing well over 20 million employees in the United States.
Media Contact
Kira Caban
Director of Strategic Communications
[email protected]Posted 12.6.2019 -
PatientPing Announces Two Additions to its Enterprise Suite of Solutions
The nation’s most comprehensive care collaboration platform launches two new products and enhancements to its product suite ahead of highly-anticipated E-notifications Conditions of Participation rule
Boston, MA- December 5, 2019–PatientPing, the nation’s leading care collaboration network, today announced the launch of two new products, Callouts and Spotlights, to its enterprise care collaboration suite. With an enterprise product suite of Pings, Stories, Callouts, and Spotlights, care teams across the continuum will get unprecedented real-time workflow guidance that improves clinical encounters and care transitions. The suite also addresses major challenges for both providers and health plans like undercompensated care, unnecessary utilization, hospital readmissions, and cross-network information silos.
Callouts enables providers, ACOs, and health plans to share important member information with point-of-care providers on multiple EHRs through a single digital channel. This integration helps avoid unnecessary utilization and guides in-network referrals. Providers and health plans can use Callouts to improve patient engagement and enroll patients in available programs and supplemental benefits. Instead of relying on point-to-point connections, Callouts makes it easy to share information for at-risk members with all providers on the PatientPing network.
Spotlights, a real-time network performance management tool, enables providers to view dashboards highlighting performance trends such as 30-day readmissions, hospital utilization, and post-acute network management. Hospitals, ACOs and post-acute providers can now monitor network wide utilization patterns and intervene to enable faster quality improvement cycles instead of waiting for months for claims-derived analytics.
PatientPing also announced significant enhancements to Stories, the industry’s first care transitions assistant for hospitals and EDs. Stories equips providers with critical patient information they need to make smarter, faster care decisions, with no disruption to the provider’s workflow.
“Hospitals are facing significant financial pressures today, and a big contributor is undercompensated care. By enabling smoother care transitions to the community via Stories, patients get better care at the right care setting such as home health and behavioral health providers and it eases the pressure on health systems,” said Sagnik Bhattacharya, Head of Product at PatientPing. “Through seamless integration with the electronic health record, providers can quickly understand a patient’s history and care relationships, reducing time-consuming detective work. This allows providers to make faster treatment decisions and safely transition the patient to the next site of care, thus reducing avoidable utilization and improving throughput throughout the health system”.
“Having the integration in our EHR is huge,” said Diane Zeitler, AVP of Quality at Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, Texas. “Our providers can quickly get the info that they need in real time, right within the patient chart, and it’s helped us reduce unnecessary readmissions. If a patient has been admitted in the last 30 days, we can go into PatientPing Stories and determine if the patient actually needs to be readmitted, or, based on their utilization history, direct them to a more appropriate care setting.”
“Over the past few years, the industry has made a lot of progress towards interoperability,” said Sagnik Bhattacharya. “However, the power of real-time information delivered intuitively in care providers workflows is a game-changer. As the industry moves to value-based care, delayed claims-based information is simply not good enough to affect outcomes. EHR-to-EHR interoperability works for some use cases, but does not cover the full continuum of care across providers, hospitals, post-acute providers, behavioral health organizations and health plans. Even when information is present, it takes too long for clinicians to identify signal from the noise. At PatientPing, we are maniacally focused on clinician workflow efficiency and surfacing information synthesized from across the continuum to drive organizational imperatives, whether it is reducing readmissions, managing post-acute utilization, TCM management or reducing avoidable utilization. Our enterprise care collaboration suite of Pings, Stories, Callouts and Spotlights does just that by optimizing every transition of care, inside and out of the health system.”
This announcement comes as CMS is finalizing its proposed interoperability rule, which includes the requirement that hospitals share e-notifications in the form of admit, discharge, and transfer feeds, as part of CMS’s Conditions of Participation for hospitals.
About PatientPing
PatientPing is a Boston-based care collaboration platform that reduces the cost of healthcare and improves patient outcomes by seamlessly connecting providers to coordinate patient care. The platform enables providers to collaborate on shared patients through a comprehensive suite of solutions and allows provider organizations, health plans, governments, individuals and the organizations supporting them to leverage this real-time data to reach their shared goals of improving the efficiency of our healthcare system. PatientPing is recognized as a Higher Performing Emerging Healthcare IT company by KLAS® Research. For more information, please visit www.patientping.com.
Posted 12.5.2019 -
Cleveland Clinic London Collaborates with Vocera to Build State-of-the-Art Communications Platform for Caregivers
Vocera solutions are key to an international strategy to elevate patient care, safety and experience
SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Vocera Communications, Inc. (NYSE:VCRA), a recognized leader in clinical communication and workflow solutions, today announced that the Cleveland Clinic London will use the Vocera Platform to standardize care team communication across the hospital when it opens in 2021. The eight-story, state-of-the-art facility will boast the latest technology and exceptional talent from around the world. Nurses, physicians, consultants and other care team members will use the wearable, voice-controlled Vocera Smartbadge and the Vocera Vina smartphone application to quickly connect and collaborate on patient care.
“The Cleveland Clinic, and what we do to improve the lives of patients, is very special. It has a world-wide appeal, and London is a great place to showcase the compassionate, innovative models of care we offer,” said Deborah Small, Chief Nursing Officer, Cleveland Clinic London. “We have assembled and are recruiting very specialized caregivers who will form the most outstanding teams in global healthcare, and to support them and their great work, we are deploying best-in-class technology.”
The 185-bed facility near Buckingham Palace will be the Clinic’s third international location and will focus on high acuity services, including heart and vascular diseases, neurosciences, orthopaedics, digestive disorders, and general surgery. Regardless of location, the health system aims to create consistent healing and working experiences for patients, families and care teams world-wide.
For several years, care teams at Cleveland Clinic hospitals in the U.S. and the Middle East have been using Vocera solutions to connect and collaborate. Because of this successful and trusted partnership, the health system chose to implement Vocera solutions in London. Purpose-built to leverage the full software capability of the Vocera Platform, the Smartbadge and customizable Vina app enable clinicians to communicate via voice, send and receive secure messages, manage alerts and alarms, and more. The mobile solutions provide relevant contextual information to help clinicians make informed decisions quickly. With the dynamic master directory of the communication platform, clinicians can easily reach colleagues simply by saying a name, role or group.
“We have an opportunity to build one of the most impressive hospitals in the world by investing in future-state technologies that are ahead of the curve in UK healthcare,” said Gareth Sherlock, Chief Information Officer, Cleveland Clinic London. “It is critical to have intelligent, integrated solutions that can be part of a connected ecosystem of innovation, people, processes and research on day one, and also to have the flexibility to expand as the health system expands.”
The Vocera Platform integrates with more than 150 clinical and operational systems, including electronic health records (EHR), physiologic monitors, ventilators and more. Cleveland Clinic London is planning a two-way integration with Epic, the hospital’s EHR system. Additional integrations with a real-time location system and nurse call solution also are planned.
“We are honored to be part of this journey with Cleveland Clinic London, soon to be one of the world’s most technologically advanced hospitals,” said Brent Lang, President and CEO of Vocera. “It is an exciting time for the health system and for healthcare around the globe as a new level of innovation, patient care, safety and experience evolves.”
About Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic London opens in Spring 2021. It will have 185 inpatient beds; eight operating rooms; a full imaging suite; endoscopy and catheterization labs; day case rooms for surgery; and a full neurological suite with rehabilitation. The facility will offer a full range of medical services including specialty services focusing on heart and vascular, orthopaedics, digestive diseases, neurosciences and general surgery. Visit us at clevelandcliniclondon.uk.
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation. Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. U.S. News & World Report consistently names Cleveland Clinic as one of the nation’s best hospitals in its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” survey. Among Cleveland Clinic’s 66,000 employees are more than 4,200 salaried physicians and researchers and 16,600 nurses, representing 140 medical specialties and subspecialties. Cleveland Clinic’s health system includes a 165-acre main campus near downtown Cleveland, 11 regional hospitals in northeast Ohio, more than 180 northern Ohio outpatient locations – including 18 full-service family health centers and three health and wellness centers – and locations in southeast Florida; Las Vegas, Nev.; Toronto, Canada; Abu Dhabi, UAE; and London, England. In 2018, there were 7.9 million total outpatient visits, 238,000 hospital admissions and observations, and 220,000 surgical cases throughout Cleveland Clinic’s health system. Patients came for treatment from every state and 185 countries. Visit us at clevelandclinic.org. Follow us at twitter.com/CCforMedia and twitter.com/ClevelandClinic. News and resources available at newsroom.clevelandclinic.org.
About Vocera
The mission of Vocera Communications, Inc. is to simplify and improve the lives of healthcare professionals and patients, while enabling hospitals to enhance quality of care and operational efficiency. In 2000, when the company was founded, we began to forever change the way care teams communicate. Today, Vocera offers the leading platform for improving clinical communication and workflow. More than 1,850 facilities worldwide, including nearly 1,600 hospitals and healthcare facilities, have selected our clinical communication and workflow solutions. Care team members use our solutions to communicate and collaborate with co-workers by securely texting or calling, and to be notified of important alerts and alarms. They can choose the right device for their role or task, including smartphones or our hands-free, wearable Vocera Smartbadge and Vocera Badge. Interoperability between the Vocera Platform and more than 150 clinical and operational systems helps reduce alarm fatigue; speed up staff response times; and improve patient care, safety, and experience. In addition to healthcare, Vocera is at home in luxury hotels, aged care facilities, nuclear power facilities, schools, libraries, retail stores, and more. Vocera solutions make a difference in any industry where workers are on the move and need to connect instantly with team members and access resources or information quickly. In 2017, Vocera made the list of Forbes 100 Most Trustworthy Companies in America. Learn more at www.vocera.com and follow @VoceraComm on Twitter.
Vocera® and the Vocera logo are trademarks of Vocera Communications, Inc. registered in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks appearing in this release are the property of their respective owners.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191204005301/en/
Cleveland Clinic London
Brunswick Group
+44 (0) 207 404 5959John Elias
Vocera Communications, Inc.
+1 416-899-4976
[email protected]Source: Vocera Communications, Inc.
Posted 12.5.2019 -
Sao joins Bluetree’s Executive Partner team
MADISON, Wis. – December 2, 2019 – Bluetree Network, a fast-growing Epic consulting and strategy solutions company for healthcare providers, is excited to announce Florid Sao—a former Call Center Operations Manager at City of Hope—as the latest addition to its Executive Partner team.
“It’s becoming more important than ever for organizations to provide a seamless patient experience, and that starts with centralizing and standardizing their patient access center,” says Tye Cook, Vice President of Executive Partners. “By bringing on someone like Florid who has helped build access centers from the ground up, it will provide invaluable insight for many of the organizations we work with who want to revolutionize patient care.”
Related: Click here to see our approach to building Patient Access Centers
Sao started his journey in healthcare in Keck Medicine of USC’s Access Center as a Data Coordinator before becoming a supervisor for a centralized scheduling team. During his time at Keck Medicine, he helped to plan a centralization roadmap and standardized system accounts. Most recently, Sao was the Interim Director for Quality and Business Optimization for Patient Access at City of Hope Medical Center and was instrumental in reviewing and streamlining processes to ensure excellent patient experience.
“Ultimately, I don’t think there is one way to centralize a patient access center,” says Sao. “There are so many varying resources that an organization has available to them and it’s important to be agile in order to cater to the specific needs of a client.”
About Bluetree Network: Bluetree was founded in 2012 and has a client base of more than 145 health systems nationwide, including all 10 organizations listed in the 2019-20 US News and World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll rankings. Since June 2019, Bluetree operates as an independent subsidiary of Providence. Bluetree was named the top-ranked Epic Systems Strategy, Support, & Implementations firm according to Black Book Market Research in August 2019. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, and with an office in Denver, Bluetree’s integrated team approach helps healthcare providers realize higher returns from their Epic platform investment. It received Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work award in 2019 and the United Way of Dane County Community Volunteer Business Award in May 2017.
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Interested in collaborating? Contact our Client Service team.
Interested in working for Bluetree? Head to our Join Us page.
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Media contact:
Ryan Hill
Marketing Manager
[email protected]
608.210.4567Posted 12.2.2019