Industry News

Cerner and Misys Earn Recognition and Rewards from Klas

In the 2006 KLAS CPOE Digest, Cerner was announced as an industry leader in providing healthcare information technology solutions. In its fourth annual CPOE Digest report issued on 10 February 2006, KLAS reported that Cerner’s CPOE solution, based on its Cerner Millenniumarchitecture, offers the highest value proposition for providers.

The report, an impartial summary of the CPOE market, focused on using CPOE in live inpatient and major ambulatory facilities in North America. The report focused on four primary areas of evaluation for measuring CPOE value: physician buy-in; depth of use; solution types, and patient safety, alerts and reminders. According to Kent Gale, President of KLAS, “The annual KLAS CPOE Digest report provides the healthcare industry with a measurable scorecard of healthcare IT usage and value specific to computerised physician order entry. By providing this unique tool, our objective is to help healthcare IT companies continue to improve the healthcare experience for customers. Cerner’s continued strong results on our CPOE Digest demonstrate aggressive use of the Cerner Millennium solution for patient care.”

This is the second year that Cerner has received the highest value proposition score in the annual KLAS CPOE Digest report.

In addition, Misys Healthcare Systems also continued its strong performance in the annual KLAS ratings with its acute-care

departmental products and EHR offerings, earning high marks. KLAS recognises healthcare vendors for their leadership in working with customers to resolve issues and match expectations to reality.

Misys Laboratory and Misys Radiology were designated as “2005 Best in KLAS” for placing first in their respective market solution categories for the second year in a row. Misys’ leading EHR solutions – Misys CPR, Misys EMR and Misys Homecare

– as well as their enterprise practice management solution, Misys Vision, were also among the leaders in their categories, or showed improvements from last year.

KLAS Enterprises is an organisation dedicated to improving healthcare information technology delivery. During the assessment process, KLAS performs in-depth, confidential interviews with IT executives and department directors to gather insight into specific strengths, weaknesses and future expectations of the products being reviewed.

Ekahau and Symbol Technologies TeamTogether to Location-Enable Passive RFID Tags

At RFID World on 27 February, Ekahau and Symbol Technologies announced a radio frequency identification (RFID) solution that promises more efficient tracking of the location of inventory and assets. The first applications of this new application will use a mobile computing RFID reader, which incorporates wi-fi location-enabling software designed to locate where RFID tags are being read.

Ekahau system is the only software-based, real-time location system on the market today. Leveraging existing Wi-Fi networks, the patented positioning technology, based on site calibration, can identify the location of tracked objects within a few metres.

Philips Showcases Integrated Healthcare Information Technology Solutions

At the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in San Diego, Philips demonstrated its portfolio of integrated healthcare information technology (HIT) solutions, aimed at reducing medical errors, improving patient safety and workflow efficiencies and moving hospitals closer to the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Oran Muduroglu, CEO of Healthcare IT for Philips Medical Systems, stated “this strategy is complemented by our demonstrated leadership in open architecture integration leveraging our iSite PACS Application Programming Interface (API), which enables best-of-breed integrations with multiple specialty vendors.”

In the demonstration, Philips showcased Xtenity Enterprise integrated with Philips IntelliVue monitors, iSite PACS solutions and SpeechMagic voice recognition technology.

According to Philips, this HIT solution represents the company’s approach to patient-centric care, and was demonstrated through the story of Ana, a fictional patient who experiences the patient care cycle from home to an ambulatory visit, to an inpatient stay, and finally back home again.

eHealth Success Stories to be Showcased at Tromse Conference 23-24 May

At Tromsø Telemed, the third annual European ministerial conference on eHealth, jointly organised by the European Commission and the Norwegian government, best practices in eHealth will be showcased to the public. Among the success stories from European research in eHealth, several projects such as clothing that actively monitors health data, more accurate instruments for keyhole surgery, health websites that facilitate more reliable and better quality health information, and an integrated health platform that captures and processes information for chronically ill patients will be on display.