[FL Doc]

Clerity Introduces Healthcare IT Services Division

Delivers solutions and turnkey systems for cost-effective and enhanced quality of care.

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 01, 2011--Clerity Solutions, a full-service provider of migration, modernization and optimization solutions, today introduced Clerity Healthcare, a business unit of the company that provides turnkey hardware and software solutions, as well as specialized consulting services, for the healthcare market.


Clerity formed the division to meet the acquisition, configuration and implementation of IT equipment, and software needs of healthcare providers in many settings, including small physician practices, large healthcare systems and clinical programs. The business unit also offers specialized services such as electronic health records implementation, information lifecycle management and security audits.

Rather than negotiating contracts with multiple suppliers to address hardware, software and IT service requirements, companies partner with Clerity Healthcare to get one agreement managing the entire process of obtaining and deploying IT resources, along with professional oversight of their technology investments. Clerity Healthcare has dedicated resources with healthcare specialization, and the company works with other established IT providers, such as GE Healthcare and Hewlett-Packard, to provide specialized healthcare solutions.

Clerity Healthcare is an ISO 9001:2008 certified medical system integrator, with expertise in providing turnkey systems and information lifecycle management solutions that help simplify administration and drive down the cost of IT ownership. With an installed base of over 500 customers, Clerity Healthcare has already delivered more than 400 successful electronic health record and practice management implementations at sites ranging from single physician practices to large, multi-site hospitals.

Certified pre-tested healthcare IT systems, such as those for e-medical records, are of growing importance as hospitals and physician offices implement modernized IT-based tools that cut costs and show meaningful use to qualify for financial incentives under the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Act, passed by Congress in 2009 as a means of economic stimulus, provides benefits for healthcare institutions that computerize medical records in an effort to decrease patient care errors and reduce healthcare costs. Investment in IT technology now is anticipated to result in lower long-term health spending and a more stable system.

“Healthcare organizations can modernize their IT systems while reducing costs with preconfigured, pre-tested, and certified hardware and software solutions,” explained Brandon Edenfield, president of Clerity. “Our expertise in delivering end-to-end healthcare solutions offers an effective way to improve quality of patient care.”

About Clerity Healthcare

Clerity Healthcare, a business unit of Clerity Solutions, provides turnkey hardware and software solutions that simplify operations and drive down the total cost of ownership. The company manages system procurement, configuration and implementation for all types of IT resources, including virtualized desktops. Clerity Healthcare also offers specialized services such as electronic medical records implementation, information lifecycle management and security audits. For more information, visit http://www.clerityhealthcare.com.

[TechHealth]

EHR implementation pays off for McKenzie County Memorial Hospital.

Dec. 28, 2011, 2:20 p.m. EST

McKenzie County Memorial Hospital First in State to Receive Medicare Funding for Use of Electronic Health Records
EHR System Reduces Costs, Increases Medical Accuracy and Improves Patient Care

WATFORD CITY, N.D., Dec 28, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- McKenzie County Healthcare Systems (MCHS) today announced that McKenzie County Memorial Hospital is the first hospital in North Dakota to qualify for Medicare reimbursements for using a certified electronic health record (EHR). McKenzie County Healthcare Systems will receive the reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services EHR Incentive Program. The program was created by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act to offer healthcare providers financial incentives for implementing and demonstrating meaningful use of an EHR system.

McKenzie County Memorial Hospital will be recognized for its achievement on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. by the Regional Extension Center for Health Information Technology (REACH) at a ceremony at the hospital. The event will welcome the hospital into an exclusive group of leaders in the nationwide transition to electronic health records. McKenzie County Memorial Hospital is the first hospital in North Dakota to successfully attest to meaningful use, meeting the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requirements for successfully using an EHR to improve patient care. To date only one other hospital in North Dakota has attested to meaningful use.

"We are thrilled to be the first hospital in the state to reach this major milestone in a nationwide effort to modernize healthcare information technology, make the system more efficient and control healthcare costs," said Dan Kelly, CEO of McKenzie County Healthcare Systems. "It's a real testament to the quality of the staff that we have at the hospital as well as the Healthland EHR solution that we put in place. We're looking forward to the benefits that the system will bring, like having a single patient chart throughout our system so staffs at the hospital, clinic, nursing home, and assisted living facility are all working from the same record with the same patient information. That's really important for assuring quality patient care in a multi-facility healthcare system like ours."

"Helping our clients achieve meaningful use has been a top priority for Healthland ever since the program was created," said Jim Anderson, senior vice president of sales and services at Healthland. "Our clients are rural community hospitals that often don't have the immediate capital resources to acquire an EHR solution. The EHR Incentive Program funding is often the only way they can implement electronic health records. The Healthland EHR is created specifically for rural hospitals to help improve efficiency, accuracy, and the overall quality of patient care. We are proud to partner with McKenzie County Healthcare Systems and we congratulate them on their milestone and their leadership in adopting electronic health records."

EHR adoption incentives from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are offered to physicians, providers, and hospitals until 2015, after which the federal government may levy penalties for failing to adopt electronic health records. Hospitals can qualify for $2 million or more through the program, depending on the costs involved in implementing an EHR solution and upon demonstrating meaningful use of the system. REACH is a regional extension center created to help clinicians in Minnesota and North Dakota become meaningful users of EHR systems as defined by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

About McKenzie County Healthcare Systems Located in Watford City, ND, McKenzie County Healthcare Systems is committed to serving the needs of our patients and their families, whatever they may be. McKenzie County Healthcare Systems was founded on July 1, 2004 with the merger of the Good Shepherd Home Corporation and the McKenzie County Memorial Hospital Corporation, consolidating all of the healthcare services in McKenzie County. The system is comprised of McKenzie County Memorial Hospital, McKenzie County Clinic, Good Shepherd Nursing Home, Horizon Assisted Living and Healthy Hearts Wellness Center. McKenzie County Healthcare Systems is committed to providing quality services, continuity of care, the assurance of qualified staff and family involvement for individual patients.

SOURCE: McKenzie County Healthcare Systems

[EMRexpert]

Advanced electronic health care tools and resources spread through Michigan.

United Outstanding Physicians Chooses Amagine To Deliver New Online Tools For Enhancing Patient Care

January 4, 2012

United Outstanding Physicians (UOP) announced plans recently to team with Amagine, Inc., a subsidiary of the American Medical Association (AMA), to bring advanced electronic health care tools and resources to its network of nearly 1,000 private practice physicians in Michigan.

Physicians affiliated with UOP will now have access to AMA ePrescribe, an electronic prescribing tool powered by Allscripts that sends prescriptions to pharmacies instantly, helping physicians improve patient care, simplify office workflow and receive instant checks on drug interactions, dosage levels and adverse reactions.

UOP physicians will also have access to WellCentive Registry. This web-based tool plays an important role in supporting point-of-care decisions and monitoring quality of care for patients.

"Working with physicians to improve the delivery of quality medicine and reduce health care costs has been a central mission of UOP," said Yasser Hammoud, M.D., UOP CEO and Medical Director. "Amagine will advance this mission by providing the tools to help physicians collaborate and coordinate patient care in the most effective manner. Additionally, physicians who use the tools offered by Amagine and UOP will possess the information technology resources necessary to achieve a patient centered medical home (PCMH) designation, participate in accountable care organizations (ACO) and qualify for federal meaningful use incentives up to $63,750."

Medicaid is promoting greater use of eletronic health records (EHR) with a program that will provide up to $63,750 in incentive payments to eligible physicians in Michigan and select states who demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology over six years. Medicare has a similar program that will provide up to $44,000 in incentive payments to eligible physicians who demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHR technology over five years. Physicians who practice in a federally designated health professional shortage area may be eligible for additional EHR incentive payments under the Medicare program. Physicians have the choice of participating in an EHR incentive program for Medicaid or Medicare, but not both in the same year.

"Amagine was designed with physicians' needs in mind," said Robert Musacchio, Ph.D., senior vice president, AMA Business Product Solutions. "We are committed to helping United Outstanding Physicians transition to new technologies that can better monitor and manage care to patients."

Amagine's physician portal uses the cloud computing platform provider, Covisint, a Compuware Company. The portal provides a single point of access to more than 30 solutions designed to enhance efficiency in a medical office, including tools that support electronic medical records, claims management, and point-of-care clinical decisions. UOP affiliated medical practices have access to secure communication features that enable HIPPA-compliant messaging among practices within the network.

About United Outstanding Physicians
UOP is a leading physician organization comprised of nearly 1000 private practice physicians with admitting privileges at Southeast Michigan's largest hospitals. UOP works in collaboration with its physicians and believes that local healthcare, led by physicians, and placing patients first is the solution to improving the quality of healthcare and reducing cost outcomes.
About Amagine, Inc.
Amagine, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American Medical Association, provides health information technology resources. Consulting, and solutions for physicians and their practices through the Amagine physician portal.

SOURCE: United Outstanding Physicians & Amagine, Inc.

[EMRexpert]

CHRISTUS Health Selects Compuware to help systems stay up and running 24/7.

Jan. 24, 2012, 8:57 a.m. EST

CHRISTUS Health Selects Compuware to Improve Performance and Availability of Clinical EHR Systems
Compuware Gomez® Helps CHRISTUS Health Proactively Identify and Fix Performance Issues From the Clinician's Perspective, Improving Patient Care

DETROIT, Jan 24, 2012 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, today announced that CHRISTUS Health, one of the nation's largest Catholic health systems based in Irving, TX, has selected the Compuware Gomez® Platform to optimize the performance and availability of its clinical electronic health records (EHR) systems. With visibility into clinician end-user experience, CHRISTUS Health can now proactively identify and resolve performance issues before they impact patient care and prevent unexpected system downtime, maximizing productivity.

CHRISTUS Health is a 60-hospital health system with nearly 350 medical facilities and services located across the southern U.S. and Mexico and more than $4 billion in assets. With nearly two million patient discharges a year, the health system has a strong commitment to providing the highest quality of care to patients through IT innovation.

At CHRISTUS Health, application performance plays a critical role in the delivery of patient care. The IT team supports about 30,000 users (doctors, clinicians, etc.) across the CHRISTUS health system who utilize clinical EHR systems daily and expect those systems to be up and running 24/7, outage-free to ensure patients receive the best quality of care.

In order to ensure the best patient care, the CHRISTUS Health IT team needed visibility into performance issues before they impact the quality of care doctors and clinicians deliver to patients. CHRISTUS Health chose the Gomez® solution for application performance management (APM).

"Our physicians and clinicians expect our EHR systems to be available and working, problem-free, 24/7. If our systems are down, patient care can suffer, and that's unacceptable," said George Conklin, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at CHRISTUS Health. "With the Gomez solution, now we have complete visibility into end-user experience and can measure end-to-end system performance from the clinician's perspective. Now my team has a better picture into application performance and can proactively find and fix problems before clinicians and patients are impacted."

In one instance, in just a matter of minutes, the Gomez solution was able to identify a problem with a switch that had obsolete firmware as the cause of application delays that CHRISTUS Health had been experiencing for some time.

"Normally, we would have spent hours, if not days trying to find the problem," said Conklin. "But with the Gomez solution, the Compuware APM team was able to immediately find and isolate the problem, enabling my IT team to quickly fix it, saving us time and money. This pretty much sealed the deal for us in selecting Compuware."

In the future, CHRISTUS Health plans to expand the Gomez solution further into its clinician integrated network and use it to monitor the performance of its mobile and cloud-based applications, as well as into its ambulatory environment. Additionally, Compuware will develop a series of dashboards for CHRISTUS Health that monitors and shows compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) that can be reported to executives.

"Poor application performance has a significant effect on clinician adoption and how patient care is delivered, so it's critical that hospitals have high-performing, outage-free systems," said Larry Angeli, Vice President of Healthcare Solutions at Compuware Corporation. "With the Gomez solution in place, CHRISTUS Health can quickly pinpoint performance issues and fix them before the clinical staff is even aware of it. This instills greater confidence in IT and improves clinician productivity and satisfaction with EHR systems."

Compuware will host a webcast with CHRISTUS Health around its EHR performance journey on February 15.

The Gomez platform is the industry's leading solution for optimizing the performance of Web, non-Web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Gomez provides a unified view across the entire application delivery chain, from a user's browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud, to inside the data center, eliminating blind spots from the First Mile to the Last Mile.

Compuware is recognized as a leader in Gartner Inc.'s "Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring" report.

Compuware Corporation

Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world's most important technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites.

© Copyright 2010 GlobeNewswire, Inc. All rights reserved.

[MedicalMary]

Walgreens and Surescripts help to enhance communication between stores and primary care physicians.

March 12, 2012, 9:02 a.m. EDT

Walgreens and Surescripts Improve Coordination of Care by Electronically Delivering Immunization and Patient Summary Records to Primary Care Providers
Surescripts Network Accelerates Interoperability Between Physicians, Pharmacists and Take Care Health Providers by Making It Easier to Supply Information Often Missing During Patient Visits

DEERFIELD, IL and ARLINGTON, VA, Mar 12, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Walgreens today announced that it will use Surescripts' Clinical Interoperability services to electronically deliver patient data directly to primary care providers to improve the coordination of care. In the coming months, all of the 7,800 Walgreens and Duane Reade pharmacies and 350 Take Care Clinics nationwide will use the Surescripts network to deliver immunization records to the patient's primary care provider. Later this year, Walgreens will also use the Surescripts network to provide immunization reporting to state and local public health agencies, and Take Care Clinic patient summaries to the patient's primary care provider.

"Currently, Walgreens pharmacists and Take Care Health providers can submit these patient records to physicians by fax or traditional mail. By using Surescripts' network to provide this important information electronically, we can improve the care that patients receive by making it easier for providers to compile more complete medical histories for their patients," said Jeffrey Kang, M.D., M.P.H., senior vice president of health and wellness services and solutions for Walgreens. "We know how difficult it is for patients to remember which immunizations they've had and when. This will help physicians have a more thorough health care conversation with their patients."

In the current 2011-12 flu season, more than 27,000 certified immunizing pharmacists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants at Walgreens and Duane Reade pharmacies and Take Care Clinics so far have administered more than 5.5 million immunizations. In the coming months, Walgreens will have the ability to electronically send a record of customers' immunizations to their primary care provider. For those who opt in to the service, Surescripts will use a standard format to capture immunization details and send the record to the patient's primary care provider in whatever form the provider is able to receive it -- electronically or via fax or mail. Physicians using a Surescripts certified electronic health record will have the option of receiving immunization records via the Surescripts Clinical Interoperability Network.

A recent survey of 400 physicians by Surescripts illustrated the challenge of compiling more complete medical records: 39 percent responded that they are frequently missing immunization records during patient visits; 35 percent are often missing patient summaries.

"Pharmacies continue to lead by example in their efforts to connect care and enable health care providers to share and access clinical information when and where it is needed," said Harry Totonis, president and CEO of Surescripts. "Today, Surescripts is the largest, neutral, national network for clinical messaging. Using their connection to the Surescripts network, Walgreens pharmacists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants will improve the coordination of care by sharing immunization records and patient summaries with patients' primary care providers. This is the latest example of how Surescripts is connecting healthcare, supporting meaningful use and enabling pharmacies to support improvements in care, safety, cost and health outcomes."

Clinical interoperability -- defined as a health care provider's ability to electronically share a patient's health information -- is viewed by experts as the next critical step to accelerate the digital transformation of the nation's health care system. The advance of clinical interoperability plays a central role in a number of important national health care initiatives: improving continuity of care; supporting the "meaningful use" of electronic health records; and advancing the patient-centered medical home model of care.

The Surescripts Clinical Interoperability Network supports all federal and state policies and standards for health information exchange, including privacy and security standards (such as HIPAA and state law), technology interoperability standards (such as Direct) and message types such as HL7.

The Surescripts Clinical Interoperability Network is available to any pharmacy for clinical summary communication. The Clinical Interoperability Network, announced in October 2010, has provided electronic, fax and mail communication services for other pharmacy clinics since 2008. This service is also being rolled out to 500 hospital labs to connect to public health under a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is also being used by physicians for physician-to-physician communication and care coordination.

About Surescripts The Surescripts network supports the most comprehensive ecosystem of health care organizations nationwide. Pharmacies, payers, pharmacy benefit managers, physicians, hospitals, health information exchanges and health technology firms rely on Surescripts to more easily and securely share health information. Guided by the principles of neutrality, transparency, physician and patient choice, open standards, collaboration and privacy, Surescripts operates the nation's largest health information network. By providing information for routine, recurring and emergency care, Surescripts is committed to saving lives, improving efficiency and reducing the cost of health care for all.

About Walgreens Walgreens is the nation's largest drugstore chain with fiscal 2011 sales of $72 billion. The company operates 7,830 drugstores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Each day, Walgreens provides nearly 6 million customers the most convenient, multichannel access to consumer goods and services and trusted, cost-effective pharmacy, health and wellness services and advice in communities across America. Walgreens scope of pharmacy services includes retail, specialty, infusion, medical facility and mail service, along with respiratory services. These services improve health outcomes and lower costs for payers including employers, managed care organizations, health systems, pharmacy benefit managers and the public sector. Take Care Health Systems is a Walgreens subsidiary that is the largest and most comprehensive manager of worksite health and wellness centers and in-store convenient care clinics, with more than 700 locations throughout the country.

SOURCE: Surescripts