February, 2012 — You may be receiving questions from health care professionals regarding Meaningful Use. Now that 2014 has been set as the deadline for implementing Syndromic Surveillance, hospitals, physicians’ offices, and urgent care facilities must connect to a surveillance service in order to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Programs.
February, 2012 — In response to a client’s request, Health Monitoring Systems (HMS) is working to expand the number of data types collected by the EpiCenter service. For this specific project, HMS will add three more qualifiers—for patient temperature, preliminary diagnosis, and disposition—to be collected when patients are admitted to the emergency room. The overall project goal is to enhance surveillance capabilities and increase insight into possible public health outbreaks.
February, 2012 –Health Monitoring Systems (HMS) believes that Meaningful Use and Syndromic Surveillance provide a unique opportunity for public health professionals to better serve their constituencies. When physicians’ offices and other ambulatory care facilities implement Syndromic Surveillance data collection, valuable information is collected that helps public health professionals to be better aware of health threats.
January, 2012 — The Smith Clinic and Kettering Health Network in Dayton, Ohio, recently signed on to become the first physicians’’ practices to utilize EpiCenter.
January, 2012 — HMS recently entered into a three-year contract with the Alameda County Public Health Department. Alameda County is the seventh California county—the others include Fresno, Humboldt, Nevada, Sacramento, Tulare, and Ventura—to utilize EpiCenter’s community health monitoring services.
November, 2011 — This fall, listeria food poisoning from tainted cantaloupes resulted in 29 deaths across the United States—an event that WebMD called the “deadliest listeria outbreak in U.S. history.”
October, 2011 — When meteorologists predicted that Hurricane Irene would make a significant impact in New Jersey, the state’s Department of Health & Senior Services contacted HMS to request that a classifier be added to EpiCenter—to identify hurricane-related ER visits.
Pittsburgh, PA — Health Monitoring Systems (HMS) announces a major expansion in the coverage of its EpiCenter service to include all 8.7 million residents of New Jersey. HMS recently entered an agreement with the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services to connect every hospital in the state to the EpiCenter service, which electronically monitors community health.
Pittsburgh, PA, August 1, 2010 — Bill Flanagan of Pittsburgh’s NBC affiliate (WPXI) interviews Dr. A Thomas McGill of Butler Memorial Hospital and Health Monitoring Systems’ CEO, Kevin Hutchison. Butler partnered with Health Monitoring Systems to study the effects of electronic health information exchange on operations and patient care.
Friday, June 04, 2010
By Erich Schwartzel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Read more