Healthcare IT News - August 2008 - (Page 33)

www.HealthcareITNews.com vENdoRS August 2008 ■ Healthcare IT News 33 Laserfiche unveils Rio enterprise suite By ErIC WICkluNd, Managing Editor Healthcare IT products tend to become complex and unwieldy as add-ons are introduced, to the point that they cost the provider time and money rather than saving anything. With that in mind, Laserfiche, the Long Beach, Calif.-based developer of digital document management technology, is introducing Laserfiche Rio, an enterprise suite designed to help healthcare providers roll out solutions system-wide. “Controlling costs and streamlining business processes is a major concern for healthcare organizations. With Laserfiche Rio, we’re combining LONG BEACH, CA – transparent records management with ECM to create a system that offers both departmental flexibility and central IT control,” said Laserfiche President and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker prior to the product’s August 8 roll-out. “Organizations are used to working in a digital environment, yet they’re still dealing with a mix of content,” added Dan Lundy of JPI Data Resources, a reseller of Laserfiche products. “People really want to have an enterprise content management system.” Rio’s attraction, Lundy says, is based on its licensing structure. Organizations purchase a named license for each user (the system starts with 100 licensed users) at $100 to $700 each, depending on the number of licenses purchased. There are also an unlimited number of servers, which can be used as back-ups or for testing. To add to the system, customers need only purchase more licenses. The system offers business process management and information distribution tools as well as document management capabilities. Areas covered by the suite include admissions, back office, billing, patient records, human resources, accounting, legal issues and credentialing. “All of these pieces of functionality are part of this Rio deployment,” said Lundy. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: SUIte 0808 Beneﬁtfocus’ production studio in Charleston, S.C., is a major component of its new Video-as-a-Service solution. vaas Continued from page 32 ● Tug Continued from page 32 LaFlamme as the TUG’s conductor. Costa said it took about a year to design and test the JR TUG for use in a children’s environment. “Our JR TUG makes the delivery of equipment and supplies more efficient while offering some cheer to our young patients,” said Tom Lausten, director of pharmacy services at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. “In addition, staff is able to focus on patient care without having to worry about the logistics of delivery.” According to Costa, many hospitals employing TUGS – there are about 250 in use in roughly 110 hospitals around the country including six at Providence Hospital – adopt and decorate the robots to “make them part of the family.” Some hospitals have naming contests (staff at Bethesda Memorial Hospital, for example, calls theirs Tray-C), while many decorate the TUG for holidays and other occasions. Costa said Aethon is looking into other themed TUGS, as well as designing a decoration kit, much like that used with an iPod, to allow hospitals to do their own decorating. And as always, he said, the company is constantly working to improve the TUG’s operations and expand its uses into other parts of the healthcare network, such as delivering meals to patients. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: tUG 0808 ● Novo Continued from page 32 nation’s largest health information exchanges, to help provide greater access to Shared Health members’ clinical health records. And last month, the company announced an agreement with Palomar Pomerado Health of San Diego to improve information exchange with physician practices. According to Arent, Novo’s technology is usually part of an IT initiative – and one that healthcare providers sometimes think they can do on their own. “a lot of our customers did it themselves ﬁrst, until they found out it was challENGING, RESouRcE-INtENSIvE aNd Not ScalaBlE.” – Doug Arent “A lot of our customers did it themselves first,” he says, “until they found out it was challenging, resource-intensive and not scalable.” Such was the case, Arent says, with Intermountain Healthcare of Salt Lake City, which signed a multi-year program agreement in May with Novo Innovations. The two had already partnered to ital health companion,” said J. Peter Waegemann, CEO of the Bostonbased Medical Records Institute, which sponsors TEPR. “This will be a whole industry that will be developing in the coming year.” TEPR featured a demonstration of AllOne Health Group, Inc.’s AllOne Mobile secure phonebased application. The WilkesBarre, Pa.-based developer of services for healthcare purchasers and payers has since deployed AllOne Mobile on a platform developed by Canada’s Diversinet to 350,000 members of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Other insurance plans are interested in the standards-based approach, which could jump-start the use of personal health records by a broad segment of the population. Diversinet formally launched its MobiSecure Wallet and Vault products in June. Company officials said the products work together to create a secure encrypted platform that gives end-users secure access to their data and documents. The current version of AllOne Mobile requires users to input their health information, but Stuart Segal, AllOne’s vice president, said the cominterface Intermountain’s hospital systems with electronic medical record systems located in several affiliated physician practices and clinics. Now Intermountain wanted to interface electronic lab results with its 200 physicians. “A number of practices and clinics needed automated delivery of laboratory results directly into pany expects to offer a version that will pre-populate a user’s record with a payer’s claims data or pharmaceutical prescription information. “As far as pulling claims information, it isn’t that far of a reach to get (a payer) system to download to our platform and then push that out over the phone,” he said. Healthcare IT vendors say cell phone applications will likely dominate the market for some time. “I think we’re at the very early stages of where this is going,” said Greg Juhn, vice president of product strategy for A.D.A.M., Inc., an Atlanta-based provider of health information and benefits technology solutions. “There are a lot of times when you need health information and you’re not anywhere near your computer.” “A.D.A.M. has always been interested in what we can do with cell phones,” Juhn said. “The iPhone kind of upped the game for everyone.” “Of course, there’ll be lots of crap developed, too,” he added. Editor Fred Bazzoli contributed to this story. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: PHoNeS 0808 their EMRs, and we understood the importance of such a capability for improving patient care and adding business value,” said Ryan Smith, assistant vice president of ebusiness services at Intermountain Healthcare. “Novo allows us to bypass the job of building an interface for each EMR in our community, which is an extremely resource-intensive job that’s also non-scalable,” added Marc Probst, CIO and vice president of information systems at Intermountain Healthcare. ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: NoVo 0808 training videos for its employees and safety training videos for staffing agencies. Shawn Jenkins, Benefitfocus’ president and CEO, said VaaS fits neatly into the company’s benefits management 2.0 goals. “Combining our new VaaS offering with our well-established Software as a Solution platform we are rapidly changing the healthcare ecosystem,” he said. “These innovations are allowing carriers and employers to control cost, enhance healthcare and maintain a competitive edge.” According to the research firm comScore, Inc., 11 billion videos were viewed online in April 2008, a 50 percent jump in one year. The number fueled Benefitfocus’ first video venture, icyou, an online repository of healthcare-related videos launched last year. The company started with roughly 200 videos last September and now has thousands in its library. “We really didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” says SossamonPogue. “We wanted to be the online source for anyone looking for a (healthcare video). We’re the aggregators.” ■ More at HealthcareITNews.com e Connect: VaaS 0808 ● ● PHoNEs Continued from page 1 Smartphones, it will allow obstetricians to access real-time and historical waveform data for both the mother and the baby from the hospital’s labor and delivery unit over a cell phone. Meanwhile, Opus Healthcare Solutions, Inc. of Austin, Texas ,has launched the latest version of OpusLaboratorySuite, which includes remote reporting, allowing clinicians to view results on a smart phone or PDA via a cell phone network of hospital Wi-Fi connection. And CareTools, Inc. of Westlake Village, Calif. is making its digital medical record system for iPhone and iPod available at the Apple App Store. The cell phone movement gained ground at the Towards the Electronic Patient Record (TEPR) conference last May in Fort Lauderdale, where more than 2,000 attendees were invited to download mock health data on their cell phones as part of a ninemonth-long project to demonstrate portability. “The cell phone is becoming a dig- FREE YOUR PRESS Custom reprints provide a proven alternative to your standard marketing material. If your company has recently received coverage in Healthcare IT News or Healthcare Finance News, you can take that press and redistribute it directly within your market. Published in partnership with Health Care Service Corp.’s headquarters in Chicago. Direct Mail Media Kits Tradeshow Collateral #1-22381138 Posted with permission Group, 717.399.1900. 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Healthcare IT News - August 2008 Contents Closer to IT Bill PHIN or RHIOs? Making Leaps After the Flood Tidal Change Denmark Bound Bridging the Divide Robot That Could Mobile Computing Data Everywhere

Healthcare IT News - August 2008

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