Achieving “Meaningful Use” has immediate and long term implications for healthcare providers. System vendors have responded aggressively to make their applications ARRA-compliant. However, a very challenging hurdle remains. Healthcare applications will soon be required to generate and consume continuity of care documents (CCDs) containing machine readable, discretely coded patient data. Clinical Architecture solutions clear this hurdle by automating the management and translation of the terminologies used in CCDs.
Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Record Technology
Physicians and hospitals are struggling to ensure that specific demographic and clinical information is recorded on all patients. To be eligible for incentive payments, they must ensure the required thresholds are achieved. Additionally, certain clinical actions need to be taken on specific patient populations in order to meet the Meaningful Use Clinical Quality Measures.
Structured, coded information is critical for taking advantage of the Health Record Software features that assist users in achieving Meaningful Use. Without structured and consistently coded data, none of the following Meaningful Use requirements can be met:
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Automated, proactive identification of patients that are missing information or not meeting a clinical quality indicator so that deficiencies can be corrected
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Electronically generating reports on compliance for recorded information
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Electronically generating the numerators and denominators for quality measures
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Electronic Communication of information to other systems using terminologies required by the HIPAA Transactions and Code Sets Rule and Federal EHR Legislation
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Generation of a properly coded CCD or CCR
SYMEDICAL Server is a Clinical Terminology Architecture that allows you to increase the value of clinical terminology. At run-time, SYMEDICAL Server’s Cognition Engine normalizes terms into domain structures, allowing the Coordination Engine to dynamically map disparate data to common terminology sets in real time. , That means systems can “understand” and act upon the data sent and received from other systems.
It can work with standard, proprietary, structured free text and home-grown terminologies. Because it constantly monitors terminology transactions, SYMEDICAL Server learns from the transactions it processes and the manual decisions made by users. In fact, when an unrecognized term is encountered, or the effectiveness of the map falls below a specified threshold SYMEDICAL Server’s Communication Framework alerts the responsible person and assists by presenting candidates to consider.