Skyrocketing healthcare costs are making it hard for the average person to afford adequate treatment when he or she becomes ill. The industry is making an effort to cut costs wherever possible by introducing different types of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Electronic health records (EHRs) are designed to give healthcare organizations access to actionable healthcare information, bringing the benefits of business process management to this industry. One of the biggest problems healthcare providers face is the lack of communication between departments within the same organization and other facilities.
By allowing them to communicate more effectively, healthcare providers will be able to deliver better services to their patients while reducing costs. EXTENSION, a service provider that delivers important event data and notifications to healthcare professionals on a mobile handset, has entered into a reseller agreement with Siemens Healthcare, a provider of enterprise EHR solutions with embedded workflow technology that brings the benefits of business process management into the healthcare environment.
This agreement will enable healthcare professionals to quickly act on information by allowing them to access the data wherever they are on their mobile device. Siemens will start offering EXTENSION's solutions as a value added complement to an enterprise EHR.
"As the EHR market grows, hospitals are seeking key differentiators among vendors and one way to do that is to extend the EHR to all of the prevalent communication devices in use by clinicians today. By deploying EXTENSION’s EHR-e technology, Siemens will enable customers to extend the value of their EHR by empowering them to receive alerts, notifications and secure messages on their mobile devices," said Todd Plesko, CEO at EXTENSION.
The EXTENSION platform is a communication and workflow software unifying clinical/telephony systems and people that are disconnected. It is an EMR-Extender that delivers messages by filtering through large amounts of data while aggregating relevant information and sending smart messages to the right person. It uses pre-established rules or triggers to make sure the information gets to the right person. Organizations can configure the application to set different parameters so they can define rules, workflow, prioritization and escalation specific to their needs.
The EXTENSION software solutions is built on the EXTENSION Engine, a proprietary messaging platform compatible with data formats such as HL7, TAP, SMTP, and web services such as SOAP and REST. When Siemens combines this software with its own products, it will give healthcare facilities the ability to explore unit, hospital, and network-specific workflow customization for mobile devices.
"This combined approach with EXTENSION enables Siemens Healthcare to securely ‘mobilize’ the functionality of one of our key differentiators, our workflow engine, in a manner that helps customers improve the way they receive this information. With this pairing, we envision more opportunities to help customers connect providers and patients to better coordinate care," said David Hamilton, senior vice president, Enterprise Services, Siemens Healthcare.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
