The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working on a new public health alert system with General Electric Co.’s (NYSE:GE) healthcare business.
The CDC is collaborating with GE Healthcare to test an electronic medical record-based health alert system for doctors, the company said.
The system works by anonymizing data entered by a doctor into an EMR and searching an archive of other de-identified medical records for similar data. The goal of the project is to let physicians know immediately through the EMR whether the health information they’ve entered for a patient matches disease profiles aggregated and stored in the archive, according to GE Healthcare.
“Our first use case explores foodborne illness — and CDC estimates there are 48 million cases of it in the US alone each year. As symptoms are captured by the computer, CDC matches them to patients reporting the same symptoms in a concentrated area — and a public health alert is issued. We could potentially reduce full days off the typical time needed to disseminate a public health alert, potentially saving lives,” said GE Healthcare IT medical informatics head Dr. Mark Dente in prepared remarks.
The project will start with a six-month study to test the frequency of alerts and whether doctors take the advice displayed within the alerts, GE Healthcare said. The project was announced this week at the annual Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society conference.
"The adoption rate for EMR systems is increasing and public health needs to leverage data from these systems. Providing public health information to providers at the point of care based on presenting symptoms of the patient is a big leap forward." CDC Informatics Practice, Policy and Coordination division director Nedra Garrett said in prepared remarks.
Here’s a look at some of the news coming out of HIMSS‘s 2011 conference and exhibition in Orlando, Fla.
- GE Healthcare announces eHealth community desktop application for clinician collaboration
GE Healthcare IT announced its eHealth Community Desktop, an open standards framework for delivering clinical applications built on top of a connected healthcare community. Its foundation is a portal technology that provides Clinicians and other providers across the healthcare continuum a web-based, simple and easy way to view patient data available within a Health Information Exchange (HIE). "Where possible, GE Healthcare integrates clinical data from the HIE directly into provider’s existing workflows and familiar EMR screens. Now, multidisciplinary care team members, regardless if they use an EMR or not, can actively track their patient’s care, leverage advanced applications provided via the HIE and better support complex care management," vice president of GE Healthcare’s eHealth Solutions business Earl Jones said in prepared remarks.
Read more - GE Healthcare announces two EMR enhancements that support meaningful use
GE Healthcare announced two new EMR solutions that have been certified for meaningful use. Centricity Practice Solution 10 and Centricity Patient Online 12 are enhancements to existing EMR solutions from GE Healthcare that will help customers achieve Meaningful Use and go beyond, meeting the needs of clinicians and patients with elegant design, intuitive workflows and easy-to-use features.
Read more - Sprint and IDEAL LIFE partner on home healthcare product
Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE:S) partnered with IDEAL LIFE Inc. to expand IDEAL LIFE’s product portfolio to include embedded wireless devices. The companies will develop, certify and co-market a version of the IDEAL LIFE hub to transmit health data over the Sprint network in the U.S. IDEAL LIFE manufactures in-home health monitoring equipment for individuals with chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, asthma and obesity. The agreement between Sprint and IDEAL LIFE means that the entire system will work wirelessly utilizing Sprint’s machine-to-machine (M2M) platform and the nationwide Sprint network to transmit medical data to health care providers to support diagnosis and general monitoring.
Read more - AT&T announces two patient care pilot programs
AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) announced two new patient care technology pilots, and new enhancements to the services delivered by AT&T ForHealth, AT&T’s healthcare practice area. The company also said it has been accredited to provide specialized information security consulting services to help healthcare customers streamline their security and compliance processes.
Read more - Philips and Microsoft collaborate on radiology workflow
Royal Philips Electronics NV (NYSE:PHG) and Microsoft Corp. (NSDQ:MSFT) plan to collaborate to streamline the workflow of radiologists as they seek to build and understand the complete clinical context of a patient. The collaboration builds upon the companies’ existing commitment to work together to connect technologies that will help yield faster delivery of meaningful health information, improve healthcare efficiency and productivity, and reduce development and infrastructure costs.
Read more - SAP launches Collaborative E-Care Management
To address the current reactive approaches to treating chronic and post-acute care conditions, SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) is launching a new solution. The SAP Collaborative E-Care Management application connects patients, healthcare providers and their families through medical monitoring software and mobile devices to better manage their health with individualized treatment plans and educational content. For example, SAP and its partners are integrating glucometers into the SAP solution. As the devices capture clinical data, alerts can be generated in real time to patients via text message or e-mail to prompt them to take the necessary actions. Providers can also be alerted to patient-specific criteria, such as when a patient’s glucose crosses a predetermined level. With the SAP technology, patients will be able to use mobile devices to track their health status, interact with providers and monitor how they are progressing on an individualized care plan developed with their provider.
Read more - Practice Fusion partners with LogMeIn to give docs EMR access through iPads
Practice Fusion is now providing access to its EMR system through Apple mobile and Google Android devices. The company teamed up with LogMeIn, the remote access software company behind the top grossing 3rd party iPad app of 2010, to bring iPad, iPhone and Android device access to Practice Fusion users. The iPad solution is a secure and easy way for medical professionals to stay connected to the free Practice Fusion EMR platform and costs $29.95. The LogMeIn solution represents the first step in Practice Fusion’s mobile strategy, according to the company.
Read more - Nuance introduces cloud-based medical speech recognition platform
Nuance Communications Inc. (NSDQ:NUAN) announced that its medical speech recognition capabilities and latest advancements in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technology will be available through the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform. With this new cloud-based platform, third-party developers can rapidly incorporate Nuance Healthcare technologies as part of a wide variety of healthcare applications, providing users with new capabilities for speech-driven clinical documentation, voice navigation and automatic clinical fact extraction. By providing all of the CPU intensive speech and language processing in the cloud, the platform enables independent software vendors and internal development teams at provider and payer organizations to embed Nuance’s SpeechAnywhere capabilities and CLU functionality as part of browser-based applications, mobile applications and thin-client desktop solutions.
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