FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMedia Contact:
Jeff Golden
312.551.3100
hwalsh@care-communications.comAlliance Helps Hospitals Achieve and Maintain a Clean Electronic Health Record System
Pending legislation and cooperative efforts spur demand for comprehensive
solutions to assist hospitals in the migration to electronic health recordsCHICAGO and ATLANTA, August 11, 2003 – Care Communications (CARE), a leading Health Information Management (HIM) consulting company, and The Medibase Group (Medibase), a leading Master Patient Index (MPI) software developer, today announced a comprehensive solution enabling hospitals to most efficiently respond to the new financial incentives being created at the Legislative level and conform to emerging industry standards in electronic health records (EHRs).
“Many factors are causing hospitals to migrate to electronic health records, and hospitals allocate substantial investments for new and more robust information systems to do so,” said Leslie Ann Fox, CEO and president of CARE. “As data is moved from old systems to new ones, though, the tasks involved in cleaning patient data can be overwhelming for a HIM department. This partnership provides hospitals with a comprehensive solution to enhance patient safety while avoiding unnecessary and excessive operating costs that result from duplicate records, boosting productivity, and keeping pace with the industry and pending legislation.”
Some of the cooperative industry events that led to the CARE/Medibase partnership include:
June 2003: Connecting for Health, a collaborative of more than 100 public and private stakeholders representing every part of the healthcare system, whose most pressing task is to catalyze actions on a national scale that would rapidly clear the way for an interconnected electronic health information infrastructure, announced that agreement had been reached on a single set of standards to bring electronic connectivity to healthcare, as reported in the Wall Street Journal on July 1, 2003.
July 2003: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) signed an agreement with the College of American Pathologists (CAP) to license CAP’s standardized medical vocabulary system and make it available without charge throughout the U.S. This brought the concept of a common medical language even closer to reality.
July 2003: HHS commissioned the Institute of Medicine to design a standardized model of the electronic health record, which will be independently evaluated upon completion by September 1.
Some of the legislative news and milestones that led to the CARE/Medibase partnership include:
July 2003: The Bush administration vowed to seek a 53 percent increase in funding to help hospitals use IT to keep better records.
July 2003: The House Ways and Means Subcommittee introduced the National Healthcare Information Infrastructure and Interoperability Act of 2003, requiring HHS to adopt or develop standards for the interoperability of healthcare information technology systems.
“CARE has helped hospitals solve HIM problems for nearly 30 years, and I’ve never seen a widespread sense of urgency revolving around EHRs as I see today,” added Fox, CEO and president of CARE. “The high level commitment to implementing EHRs is causing hospitals to seek out competitively priced yet comprehensive solutions that blend tools and service. We’ve teamed with Medibase to offer just that, enabling a hospital to realize the long-term benefits of migrating to an EHR, which far outweigh the expense of purchasing and implementing an EHR system.”
CARE provides complete outsourced support for Master Patient Index clean-ups, including full-service clean-up solutions and MPI GaugeSM, a tool that enables hospitals to define the scope and costs of an MPI clean-up, and a full MPI clean-up service. CARE has teamed up with Medibase to offer the firm’s full suite of software tools that include BASEmatchTM, BASEnotifyTM, BASEshieldTM and BASEscanTM to electronically identify and resolve existing duplicates in EHRs and prevent new ones, adding a new level of cost-effectiveness to CARE’s comprehensive offering.
About Care Communications, Inc.
Established in 1976 and based in Chicago, CARE is a nationally recognized leader in Health Information Management (HIM), offering a full suite of HIM consulting and staffing solutions designed in improve cash flow, optimize patient revenue, and reduce costs for hospitals. CARE also provides services to research companies, insurance companies, and law offices that need in-depth analysis and extrapolation from medical records. For more information about CARE, visit www.carecommunications.com.About The Medibase Group, Inc.
Established in 1992 and located in Atlanta, Medibase specializes in helping healthcare systems achieve and maintain the highest possible integrity in their Master Patient Index. By supplying affordable state-of-the-art tools to aid in the identification and resolution of existing problems along with enhanced system-independent front-end search capabilities, Medibase is recognized as the leader in providing comprehensive technology tools. For more information on Medibase, visit www.medibase.com.
