A Medical Device Daily Staff Report
From the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS; Chicago) annual conference, Dolbey (Cincinnati) has introduced DocAssist Documentation Guides to help hospitals train their physicians to document patient reports according to the upcoming ICD-10 PCS requirements.
The transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 places new requirements on physicians as they document patient procedures. DocAssist provides a physician with a short question and answer session, or Guide, as they begin documenting a patient's procedure. These DocAssist Guides are built from a proprietary and patent-pending process that is based on a combination of coding guidelines and the words and expressions that physicians use in identification of devices, anatomy and methods.
Integrated with Dolbey's speech recognition and dictation products, DocAssist works in all the modalities that physicians use to dictate and document. If using a computer or speech recognition, DocAssist provides visual menus. When dictating over a telephone, DocAssist provides an interactive voice response with language understanding and optional SMS text messaging to prompt the physician toward an accurately coded ICD-10 PCS code.
In other news from the HIMSS floor in Las Vegas:
* Nuance Communications (Burlington, Massachusetts), has introduced two Clinical Language Understanding (CLU)-powered solutions, Dragon Medical 360 | M.D.Assist and Dragon Medical 360 | QualityAnalytics. An extension to Nuance's voice-driven clinical documentation workflow, M.D.Assist and QualityAnalytics will empower healthcare organizations to capture a complete and accurate patient story through the utilization of advanced voice technologies, as well as transform and leverage what has been captured with CLU in ways that have never been possible, the company claims.
M.D.Assist will help healthcare organizations improve clinical efficiency, drive appropriate reimbursement, and optimize coding workflow. Dragon Medical 360 | QualityAnalytics assists in the process of identifying key clinical and quality indicators from large volumes of narrative clinical data is now possible.
Beyond efficient, voice-driven data capture, with CLU, data is categorized in compliance with the Health Level Seven International (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to ensure that key clinical elements such as problems, social history, medications, allergies, and procedures are identified for reference. By tagging such key clinical data, CLU makes it possible for applications across the healthcare spectrum to process and understand clinical information that otherwise would only exist in free-form text.
* First Databank (FDB; South San Francisco, California) said its new alert management solution, FDB AlertSpace, designed to address alert fatigue in computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, has achieved industry acceptance among various U.S. hospital institutions.
Studies have shown that clinicians override the majority of medication alerts in CPOE applications, suggesting that current alert configurations may inadequately protect patient safety. FDB developed AlertSpace in order to help its thousands of customers address this common industry-wide problem with the goal to accelerate clinician acceptance and utilization of CPOE applications. At present, hospitals are aggressively deploying CPOE applications as a requirement of the HITECH Act which provides incentive payments to encourage widespread adoption and use of health information technology to improve patient care.
AlertSpace is a web-based software solution with an intuitive user interface. Users can fine-tune FDB medication alerts and customize them to their organization's circumstances and clinician perspectives as they see fit. This approach to alert management facilitates collaboration among all clinical stakeholders at an institution and enables the deployment of alert best practices across disparate institutions.
* Dell (Round Rock, Texas) introduced its latest healthcare solutions u including Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) and Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC).
Since acquiring InSite One (Wallingford, Connecticut) in Dececmber 2010, Dell says it has developed a complete clinical archiving solution that enables easy and secure data retrieval and sharing for the clinician, while simplifying IT management and maintenance overhead with a variety of storage options.
The Dell Cloud Clinical Archive is now managing more than 68 million clinical studies, nearly 4.8 billion diagnostic imaging objects and supports more than 800 clinical sites in one of the world's largest cloud-based clinical archives. Dell recently attained ISO-13485 certification for its cloud-based image archive operations.
Dell's MCC solution, introduced three years ago, has seen significant gains over the last year as hospitals seek to make information more accessible for clinicians while adhering to privacy and security regulations. Of particular concern is the proliferation of consumer-grade devices in the healthcare setting, the company said.
