PCMA on E-Prescribing: 'Each Year We Wait, More People Die'

Calling e-prescribing the most important issue to patients in the current Medicare debate, the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) has unveiled a new TV ad urging policy-makers to require the use of electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) in Medicare "before more people die."

The new ad, featuring a woman mourning at a gravesite, highlights the fact that more than 7,000 people die every year because of medication errors.

The ad is a wake up call to refocus the Medicare debate on patients, not just the providers who serve them. From a patient's perspective, e-prescribing is by far the most important issue in the current Medicare debate because it could save their life or the life of someone they love.

E-prescribing saves lives and money.

MTBC
Medical Transcription Billing, Corp.
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Call: 1-866-266-MTBC (6822)

Vocollect Healthcare Systems New Customer: Highlands at Wyomissing

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Vocollect Healthcare Systems, Inc.announces that The Highlands at Wyomissing, a continuing care retirementcommunity located in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, will deploy AccuNurse(R) voice-assisted care and take quality of care to new levels by enabling more proactive care and providing more time for direct resident care.



The Highlands will utilize voice-assisted care to enable dynamic, personalized, and interactive care throughout its nursing care program -shift-to-shift and caregiver-to-caregiver. By giving caregivers the capabilityto access resident care needs on-demand, complete paperwork simply by talking, and enhance care-team collaboration with Silent Paging(TM), The Highlands expects to achieve numerous performance gains.

According to Danielle Hammer, NHA, director of health services of The Highlands at Wyomissing, "We're always on the lookout for innovative ways totake quality of care to the next level, and technology is a key part of our strategic focus to help continuously improve resident care outcomes. AccuNurse is a one-of-a-kind solution that will enable us to achieve our goals of responding to resident needs in a timely way, maintaining a line of communication between our care team and enabling real-time flexibility so we can adapt to resident care needs on a daily basis - or even minute-by-minute,if necessary. With AccuNurse, we will not only improve outcomes, but will doso with dignity toward our residents, accuracy in our documentation, and accountability for the care we deliver 24x7 to all residents across all disciplines. We see voice-assisted care as a core component of achieving and maintaining a high standard of excellence throughout our community."

About Vocollect Healthcare Systems AccuNurse voice-assisted care from Vocollect Healthcare Systems, Inc. makes it easy for healthcare professionals to retrieve care needs on-demand,chart activities as they are completed, and Silent Page each other for help. Organizations using AccuNurse benefit from lower operating costs, maximized reimbursements, and improved quality of care. Vocollect Healthcare Systems is a subsidiary of Vocollect, Inc., the global leader in voice technology and delivering performance improvements in productivity, accuracy, cost reduction and worker satisfaction for mobile employees on six continents.

Original Article Here: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-25-2008/0004872874&EDATE=

MediVoice Partners With VisionTree: Voice ePrescribing Solution

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., July 24 /PRNewswire/ — MediVoice(R), LLC, the world’s first mobile voice-activation solution for e-Health and e-Prescribing, has formed a strategic partnership with VisionTree(R), a leading provider of interactive, web-based, patient-centered health record management and provider communication systems to integrate and market its mobile voice-activation solution with the VisionTree Optimal Care(TM) (VTOC) system.

“MediVoice is pleased to develop a strategic partnership with VisionTree. We are impressed with their web-based technology and the value it brings to physicians and patients,” said Anthony Milone, MediVoice, LLC, Board Member and Managing Director.VisionTree customers will be able to utilize MediVoice’s software platform to access the SureScripts(R) network for e-Prescribing and e-Health management.

MediVoice provides the world’s first commercially available mobile voice-activated e-healthcare solution. MediVoice utilizes the most innovative technology in speech solutions. It allows healthcare professionals to voice-activate electronic prescriptions, electronic medical records, and a wide variety of e-health services.

The use of e-Prescribing has been shown to reduce medical errors, reduce medical and administrative costs, and improve the efficiency and documentation of the medication prescription process.Martin Pellinat, CEO of VisionTree Software, said “The VisionTree Optimal Care(TM) (VTOC) platform is used by over 70 leading academic and community sites around the country for web-based patient communication and data management. With the ability for physicians to launch a voice-activated e-Prescribing solution, we have expanded the VTOC patient management system to not only include the patient’s health record, e-communication and disease management, but also include the ability for physicians to deliver the highest level of efficiency and quality care to their patients.”

Read original article here: http://www.advisemed.com/medivoicer-partners-with-visiontreer-to-integrate-its-voice-activated-e-prescribing-solution-into-visiontrees-vtoctm-web-based-patient-management-system.html

AssistMed Selected by North Dakota Agency to Provide Electronic Medical Records System

LOS ANGELES, Aug 20, 2008 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- AssistMed, Inc. today announced it has been selected by The North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide an agency-wide electronic medical records (EMR) system. Terms were not disclosed.

The system will provide healthcare professionals with state-of-the art capabilities, including prescription and pharmacy inventory tracking, the ability to monitor movements of inmates throughout the facilities, flexible bed assignment, and an EMR-integrated dental application. In addition, AssistMed's system offers speech recognition processing technology and auto-formatting and auto-correction of clinical documents.

"The selection of AssistMed's system follows an extensive evaluation of our technology and its features, including its Web-based applications and other capabilities that we demonstrated onsite to showcase the system's functionality -- as well as favorable feedback from existing users," said Leonardo Berezovsky, M.D., chairman and chief executive officer of AssistMed, Inc.

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Healthcare Provider Simplifies Billing With Coding Interface

For any business, receiving payments earlier rather than later makes a difference in the bottom line. For healthcare facilities relying on a myriad of insurance companies and government programs for reimbursement for patient treatment, a solution that streamlines the billing system can quickly pay for itself.

A 350-bed private, not-for-profit healthcare service provider in Massachusetts was experiencing delays in getting billing information to the parties responsible for reimbursing the hospital. The hospital uses advanced technological tools, including EMRs (electronic medical records), CPOE (computerized physician order entry), PCS (patient care system/nursing documentation), and BMV (bedside medication verification).

The vast amount of information that passes through the hospital's facilities, including the records of every patient (physician observations, prescription history, diagnoses, procedures performed, tracking of reactions to medications, etc.), must be converted into a universally recognized set of classifications, or codes. Medical coding has become the primary means by which insurance companies determine whom to reimburse for medical procedures and in what amounts.

The provider's healthcare information system relies on a combination of MEDITECH healthcare information system, which manages patient information and medical records; 3M medical encoding software; ProMed Scanning from BizTech Healthcare Solutions to scan medical records; and Valco Data Systems to archive the medical records on the back end.

Until recently, the hospital's medical encoding personnel would have to access patient record information in each of these systems individually in order to gain the patient data necessary to code and abstract a single patient's record.

The hospital's emergency department coding process was even more complicated because the hospital's HIM (health information management) staff was responsible for entering most of the charges generated there. Plus, the integration between the MEDITECH and 3M systems meant information had to be batch processed overnight, allowing the MEDITECH information to pass through the 3M software before it could be encoded, extending the coding and billing schedule.

Original Article: HERE

Integrated Solutions

http://www.integratedsolutionsmag.com/

Misys Optimum Video

Electronic Medical Record Technology

Cerner makes its moves beyond software

The North Kansas City-based company is vaulting beyond computer software in three key areas:

--Connecting hospital medical devices to patient electronic medical records to improve safety and efficiency.

--Coordinating health benefits for other companies to help them cut costs, boost workers' health and raise productivity.

--Crunching life science data to help determine the safety and effectiveness of drugs and medical treatment plans.

These endeavors occupy about 635 Cerner employees, a small part of the company's more than 7,600 workers around the globe, including more than 4,800 in the Kansas City area.

But the employee numbers belie the significance that Cerner attaches to these ventures.

"We are transforming ourselves from an IT company to a health-care company," Cerner president Trace Devanny said recently. "Extending our capability beyond information technology flow to that of the entire health-care process is a natural extension of our business."

Since its founding in 1979, Cerner has pushed the envelope of change. With the zeal of a cyber-missionary, it has sought to convince hospitals, doctors and other health providers to dump paper records and replace them with Cerner software. Despite frequent stock gyrations, steadily growing business testifies to Cerner's success. The company logged $1.52 billion in revenue last year, an increase of 10 percent from the previous year.

Original Article Posted HERE