“By studying the SIMTICS modules online, at their own pace, our customers will be able to learn the steps of a procedure, which instrument to use and where to apply it, and the relevant anatomical structures. That means they will be better prepared and can concentrate on more advanced aspects when they are exposed to clinical time in a hospital,” says SanjivZutshi, CEO, Medvarsity Online Ltd. “Medvarsity is delighted to have secured the right to distribute the unique SIMTICS solution in India,” he adds.

“SIMTICS complements our existing portfolio of high quality online education products and aligns with our mission to deliver Information Technology-based education to health care providers at any distance. India needs to increase its healthcare personnel by 2022. This will not be achievable using traditional methods alone. Leading-edge educational technologies like SIMTICS will be critical to meeting our country’s health care training needs.”

Cherry Vanderbeke, General Manager of SIMTICS, says India is a key market for the technology. “It was extremely important for SIMTICS to identify a partner that shares similar goals to us, that understands the education requirements of the local healthcare sector in India, and that can reach customers through a national network while providing first class service and support,” says Ms Vanderbeke.

Medvarsity Online Ltd, established in 2000 as India’s first virtual medical university, has become a reseller for SIMTICS in India and will offer the SIMTICS clinical procedure simulations through its online presence. It plans to offer the SIMTICS simulations both standalone and incorporated into certificate courses.

The analysis, which will also determine the potential health and budget impact that FFR-guided treatment provides for each of the countries, demonstrates the company’s commitment to improving the health, welfare, and quality of life for the billions of people residing in these countries.FFR measurements can be taken using the PressureWire™ Aeris or PressureWire™ Certus, and indicate the severity of blood flow blockages in the coronary arteries. This physiological measurement identifies which coronary narrowings are responsible for obstructing the flow of blood to a patient’s heart muscle (called ischemia), and guides the physician in determining which lesions warrant stenting.
The detailed analysis will be based on the results of the landmark FAME (Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR) vs. Angiography in Multivessel Evaluation) study, statistics from country-specific percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) registries and from published literature.

St. Jude Medical provided an educational grant for similar research in Europe, with results revealing that the impact of FFR-guided treatment using the PressureWire technology can improve patient health while also significantly saving money. The analysis indicated that within the health care systems of Germany, the U.K., France, Italy and Belgium that the FFR-guided approach has the potential to reduce deaths and heart attacks as well as save between 500€ and 950€ per patient, depending on the country. Additionally, previous economic analysis determined that an FFR-guided intervention strategy reduced health care costs per patient by about $2,000, or 14 percent, in the context of the U.S. health care system.
The detailed analysis will be funded by an educational research grant from St. JudeMedical and led by Professor Uwe Siebert, M.D., MSc, M.P.H., ScD and a FAME study co-author. Each country will also have local clinical advisors to help validate the data modeling.

The new name and carefully crafted lettering communicate the commitment to expert, world-class standards that Nova facilities offer their physicians and patients. The logo symbol “n” represents through its fluid shape the vitality of life. The simplicity of the overall design cues the uncomplicated and personal care that patients and their families have come to experience at Nova. To complete the look, a vibrant blue-green color vignette has been used to leave onlookers with a carefree and joyous feeling.

Standalone ambulatory surgery centers are prevalent in the USA, UK, Australia, and Europe. Short-stay and even same-day patient discharge enabled by advanced surgical and pain management techniques promote faster patient recovery and reduced health care costs. Nova Specialty Surgery has pioneered this patient-centric care delivery format in India, establishing nine such facilities in neighborhood locations across the country since it launched its first center in Bangalore in June 2009.

Health activists in India blame that the government is not taking proactive action against the strong tobacco lobby.  The Ministry has asked the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India–to make the relevant amendments in the prevention of food adulteration law.
Keshav Desiraju said there is some contradiction in the August notification which mentions tobacco as a food product. We have asked the authority to change this provision. They are in the process of doing so.

“Today’s integration challenges have moved beyond the four walls of the hospital to large distributed networks and communities of care,” says Ryan Sean Adams, Vice President of Sales at Meddius. “The edge points of these integration networks are locations like physician offices and long-term care facilities running IT infrastructure from the storage closest or in the cloud. To reliably integrate these edge points, we needed an appliance that can be deployed anywhere the data lives: in a reception area, an exam room, or under a desk.”
The Integration Router Nano is a small-form factor integration appliance designed for non-acute care environments. Fully installed in minutes, the Nano arrives pre-configured to integrate with popular practice management systems (PMS’s) and electronic medical records (EMR’s) found in physician offices. Once deployed, the Nano establishes a HIPPA-compliant tunnel to exchange electronic protected health information (ePHI) to third-parties and health systems. Organisations may use Nanos in tandem with acute-care Integration Routers to create a wide area integration network for acute and non-acute care systems.

There has been major progress in use of health information technology (health IT) by doctors and hospitals, and that new data shows nearly 2,000 hospitals and more than 41,000 doctors have now received over $3 billion in incentive payments to use health IT in a meaningful way, particularly Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

New figures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) show that physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers have received $3.12 billion in incentive payments to use EHRs to improve quality of patient care. In just one month, in January, CMS handed out $519 million to eligible providers. Incentive payments to encourage use of EHRs in meaningful ways can be up to $44,000 under the Medicare EHR Incentive Program and up to $63,750 under the Medicaid EHR Incentive Program.
This trend parallels an anticipated fast growth in the labour market for health IT jobs throughout the US.

“This solution strengthens our position in supporting our target clients by delivering an out-of-the-box solution that addresses specific areas of obstruction when it comes to accurately processing and submitting claims,” said Devon Cochenour, owner and president of CCI Tec. “This solution helps to keep healthcare IT spending down and significantly reduces human intervention and redundancies.”
TecENTERPRISE Claims Solution offers rich claims reporting, business activity monitoring and business analytics to help produce a significant return on investment (ROI) as well as reduce training and deployment time.

“The TecENTERPRISE Claims Solution is the next evolution in claims monitoring and management. The product is extremely powerful and allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of claims processing without having to ask our IT person for a custom report,” says Bob Drelick, Vice President of Information Technology at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, LA.

TecENTERPRISE Claims targets both healthcare providers and health plans that use the Edifecs Claims Validation Solution. Other alternatives, such as IBM and SAP products, are expensive to purchase, implement and maintain. At a fraction of competitor’s upfront and annual costs, the TecENTERPRISE Claims Solution offers rich claims reporting, business activity monitoring and business analytics to help produce a significant return on investment as well as reduce training and deployment time. TecENTERPRISE Claims incorporates an unlimited number of data sources not currently available in other solutions, increasing the value and breadth of reporting capabilities several times over.

TecENTERPRISE Claims is built on the proven Microsoft Platform and uses BizTalk Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server as the key technology to drive the solution. Demonstrations are currently being scheduled during the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. Please contact CCI Tec for a private session.

Siemens Enterprise Communications has leveraged its experience as an early innovator in UC to offer the OpenScape UC Suite, which is considered one of the most open and mature solutions in the market. The OpenScape Fusion Developer Program provides an open services-oriented architecture and different software development kits to enable healthcare partners to create and develop vertical-specific applications that add value to healthcare workflows.

“The OpenScape UC Suite offers a wide variety of features and capabilities such as voice over IP; instant messaging; unified messaging; mobile UC; and audio, Web and desktop video conferencing,” said Frost & Sullivan Senior Industry Analyst and ICT Team Leader Alaa Saayed. “The vendor’s significant strides in cloud communications and data center architectures, virtualisation, social media integration, and application enablement further enhance the company’s overall positioning as an end-to-end provider of advanced communications technologies.”

Siemens Enterprise Communications also provides a broad range of professional and managed services through its OpenScale Services portfolio. While OpenScale professional services support sales and deployments with custom system integration and professional services, OpenScale managed services offer various degrees and levels of system and network maintenance, proactive support, and active monitoring through several service packages.

The company’s Enterasys brand delivers a full suite of data networking products that offers top-rated, integrated wired and wireless networking solutions from the edge to the data center. The advanced wireless solutions establish a sound foundation for mobile communications deployments for healthcare workers and patients alike.

Xerox is working closely with providers to adopt ICD-10 coding standards before the government’s deadline. Xerox helps caregivers learn and adopt the new “language” of this coding system, including how to document patient care so that it can be integrated into an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system and used to improve safety and quality.

Hospitals like Bay Medical Center in Panama City, Fla. work with Xerox to get the most out of their EMR system investment. With Xerox’s help, Bay improved its clinical information systems to meet Meaningful Use requirements and recently collected millions of dollars in reimbursement funds.

“This is the latest in a number of standards jointly created as a result of our partnership with OMG. This collaborative relationship is successful because it combines HL7’s expertise in creating healthcare interoperability standards with OMG’s expertise in distributed process models, wrappers and transport specifications that are common to all industries,” said John Quinn, CTO, HL7 International. “It is also one of the first published efforts to adopt the significant contributions and balloting efforts of our volunteers from MITRE, giving HL7 implementers API access to the hData RESTful Transport specification.”

“The real impetus behind health data information standards like hData is saving lives and saving money by connecting clinical systems across doctors’ offices, hospitals and research centers. This is accomplished by overcoming the differences in systems that make sharing information difficult in the medical world,” said Dr Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., Chairman & CEO, OMG.

With the adoption at OMG and at HL7, hData is now the first set of peer-reviewed specifications within both organisations for implementing a RESTful exchange of clinical information in the context of national and international standards. With hData, implementers can achieve semantic interoperability between clinical systems both within and across organizational boundaries. By supporting a wide variety of clinical content models and media types, hData offers maximal flexibility while ensuring high scalability and efficiency through an optimised transport architecture.

“MITRE initiated and led hData’s development in 2008 in an effort to promote the adoption and use of scalable electronic health record systems,” says Gerald Beuchelt, Lead Software Systems Engineer, MITRE. “Doctors cite compliance as an area that will improve a patient’s health and also help keep costs in the US system down. Mobile health is a useful tool, but first we need scalable exchange and semantic interoperability of health IT systems, and then we can support future growth in tools like mobile health that can all share common data – hence hData.”

RESTful specification services are low-cost and easy to deploy versus other service types that are more cumbersome to build and implement. hData allows a Web developer to demonstrate a prototype in days instead of months with the current standards in use. Not surprisingly, RESTful Web services are used by companies such as Amazon.com and Google because they can scale to millions of users.

With the hData specifications, medical records present content in a tiered structure that allows for fast and secure access to only the specific information needed at a given time. This means that rather than having to download an entire record to a mobile device, doctors can download just the pieces of data they need in order to make decisions. hData makes the data securely accessible so the innovation of mobile use can happen.