Healthcare Management Systems to Unveil Ambulatory EMR
October 15, 2009
Healthcare Management Systems, Inc. (HMS®), a Nashville-based provider of integrated financial and clinical hospital information systems (HIS), and services, has announced its intent to launch a new proprietary unified ambulatory electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) solution, HMS Ambulatory EMR. Slated to be launched in October 2009, the solution will be available for customer assessment during the last week of the month, backed by a complete implementation process and its recently introduced HMS Learning InstituteSM to facilitate the training process.
HMS’ Ambulatory EMR, a clinical documentation software designed to meet the requirements of physician practices, is capable of integrating with HMS hospital IT systems. The solution’s other functionalities include e-prescribing, adding or changing templates based on physician preferences, and transcription integration. In addition, HMS also intends to provide onsite and remote training for the solution.
HMS’ president and CEO, Tom Stephenson, states that the company is looking forward to delivering an integrated solution that would help customers and their physicians qualify for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA) Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) stimulus incentives, while electronically operating their business anytime, from any location.
According to a recent KLAS report, the market for ambulatory EMR solutions is set to grow, with the ARRA requirements and the recent Stark Law relaxation driving the demands. HMS, with its intent to capitalize on these demands, plans to apply for CCHIT’s 2011 comprehensive ambulatory and inpatient EHR certification, which includes criteria for ARRA certification requirements. Under the CCHIT Certified® Comprehensive certification programs, EHRs, apart from being tested for interoperability, comprehensive functionality, and privacy and security criteria, will also be evaluated for compliance with proposed ‘certified EHR’ 2011-2012 ARRA standards. To indicate the ‘meaningful use’ criteria supported by the product, EHRs certified under CCHIT Certified® 2011 would be labeled with Certification Facts™.
In its attempt to exploit the expanding ambulatory EMR market, vendors like HMS should ensure that its product demonstrate the meaningful use of certified technology, like enhancing care delivery through decision support, capturing and exchanging data; and capabilities for determining and reporting vital clinical indicators. Despite the company’s claims of meeting these needs in their proposed launch, the new HMS solution would also have to compete in a market flooded with the broad range of ambulatory EMRs and also electronic health records (EHRs) provided by major IT vendors. Some of these are listed in the below table.
|
Vendor |
Solutions |
|
AllscriptsMisys, LLC |
Allscripts Professional EHR 8.2, 8.3 and Enterprise 11.1.6 |
|
athenahealth |
athenaClinicals 9.15.1 |
|
eClinicalWorks |
eClinicalWorks 8.0 |
|
Eclipsys Corporation |
Eclipsys PeakPractice™ version 1093 |
|
GE Healthcare |
Centricity Electronic Medical Record 9.2 |
|
NextGen |
NextGen EMR 5.5.27 |
|
Sage Software Healthcare, Inc. |
Sage Intergy version 5.5 |
The above solutions are CCHIT 2008 Certified products
The ambulatory EHR market space also witnessed the recent launch of Medisoft Clinical, an integrated EHR/PM solution for small practices by McKesson Corporation, and Dell’s entry into the EMR market, with the unveiling of its Affiliated Physician EMR Solution.
In the midst of the federal Government’s efforts towards achieving nationwide EHR adoption and healthcare provider’s thriving to meet the federal requirements, it would be noteworthy to witness how these information technology vendors modify their strategies to gain from the ARRA opportunities.
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