Vendor Notebook: Certification for wireless health devices

From the mHealthNews archive
By Mike Miliard
02:00 pm

Global Certification Forum (GCF) and Continua Health Alliance are co-operating to develop an effective certification process for wirelessly-connected personal health devices. In the mobile and many other industries, standards-based certification schemes have been proven to promote market development and growth. GCF’s proven 'test once, use anywhere' certification scheme assures mobile operators of a wireless device’s interoperability across different networks, minimizes duplication of testing and reduces time-to-market for new categories of connected devices.

Pegasystems has announced its new Revenue Cycle Manager solution for the healthcare market. It enables healthcare systems to streamline patient billing, boost cash flow and drive down operational costs by increasing the amount of clean bills produced at the outset. Unlike legacy applications that focus on resolution at the end-stages of the revenue cycle, or point solutions that take limiting approaches at some stages, Pegasystems’ Revenue Cycle Manager allows error correction at every stage.

Medicity announced that KishHealth System, anchored by two hospitals in northern Illinois, has selected its suite of health information exchange (HIE) solutions – including the Novo Grid, ProAccess Community and MediTrust Cloud Services – to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of care in its community, promote closer hospital-physician alignment and establish an infrastructure for connecting the health system to HIEs in the region and across the nation.

Voalté announced that Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Mo. has selected its popular first-of-its-kind integrated communication solution to improve nurse communication and increase efficiency, thanks to Voalté’s popular first-of-its-kind integrated communication solution.

McKesson announced that its Quality eMeasures and Clinical Performance Analytics solution has earned EHR Modular certification. The designation officially deems the electronic health record (EHR) software capable of enabling providers to qualify for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The achievement makes McKesson the first major quality/inpatient electronic health record (EHR) vendor to achieve modular certification for clinical quality measures.

Carestream Health announced that Doctors Imaging Group of Gainesville, Fla., purchased a dual-detector CARESTREAM DRX-Evolution suite for its high-volume outpatient imaging center in Gainesville. The imaging center will achieve maximum productivity with this configuration in which a cassette-size, wireless DRX-1 detector is placed in the buckys of both the wall stand and table.

PAETEC Holding Corp. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire XETA Technologies, Inc. for $5.50 per share in cash valued at approximately $61 million. XETA Technologies sells, installs and services advanced communication technologies for enterprise customers. It is among the largest full-service, providers of advanced communications solutions with 32 locations and redundant 24/7 customer contact and data network operating centers

Certify Data Systems announced that Advocate Health Care in Oak Brook, Ill., has deployed interoperability solution as the essential infrastructure for its enterprise health information exchange. Under its agreement with Advocate, Certify is offering its HealthDock™ interoperability product to Advocate’s 12 Chicago-area hospitals and affiliated physicians.

Wolters Kluwer Health, a global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, announced that Southern Ohio Medical Center will deploy its ProVation MD software for cardiology procedure documentation and coding in the hospital’s cardiac catheterization lab.

OZ Systems announced that its eScreener Plus newborn screening and data management solution passed 45 interoperability tests and integrated with all seven of the company’s targeted “domains” during the IHE North American Connectathon Conference in January. These results help illustrate that interoperability can be achieved in the industry in the near-term.

Wellsoft Corporation announced that Ridgeview Medical Center’s Two Twelve Medical Plaza is live with Wellsoft’s Emergency Department Information System (EDIS). This is the second emergency department in Ridgeview Medical Center’s health care system to implement Wellsoft EDIS. Two Twelve Medical Center will manage care for an estimated 20,000 ED patients each year.

Philips Speech Processing, manufacturer of professional mobile and stationary dictation systems, announced the availability of its new digital dictation workflow management software solution, SpeechExec Pro 7. This software update includes a new, future proof web-based licensing system, instead of the traditional hardware-based licensing previous software packages used. In addition, the latest version of the software sports a new interface design.

St. Anthony's Medical Center, the third-largest medical center in the St. Louis metropolitan area, announced that it has gone live with REACH3's healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) technology, CRM Custom, to boost targeted patient outreach efforts. To complement the CRM technology, REACH3  is continuously combining St. Anthony's internal data with its wealth of psychographic, geographic and demographic information to help the medical center implement robust marketing campaigns.

NextGen Healthcare Information Systems announced that its clients have secured nearly $2 million in reimbursements from the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) program by leveraging NextGen Ambulatory EHR and the NextGen Health Quality Measures (HQM) Reporting Module, a proprietary, clinical data repository designed for automated registry reporting of clinical outcomes and quality measure data for pay-for-performance (P4P) programs.
 
GE Healthcare and Butler Health System, which serves Western Pennsylvania communities, have announced the planned implementation of a health information exchange to enable clinical information access between BHS and its affiliated and independent physicians, as well as referral hospitals outside of the immediate community.
 
Novation, the healthcare industry supply contracting company, announced that it has awarded agreements to Philips Healthcare, Siemens Medical Solutions, and Ziehm Imaging Inc. for  Mobile Fluoroscopy – C-Arms. The agreement is effective March 1, 2011 — February 28, 2014 with up to two one-year extension options and offers savings on a variety of products for the members of VHA, Inc, University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) and Provista.
 
Webmedx, a medical content provider and the third largest medical transcription service in the U.S., announced that The Valley Hospital, a 451-bed acute care facility and member of Valley Health System in Ridgewood, New Jersey, has begun an enterprise-wide implementation of Webmedx’s newest solution for clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and quality reporting, QualityAnalytics.
 
Merge Healthcare, a global corporation dedicated to health IT interoperability solutions, announced that the company has started the year off with seven new contracts for its clinical trials solutions. These wins reflect continued momentum across all the clinical trials applications, and represent both new and expanded customer relationships.