With less than a week to go before the annual HIMSS conference in New Orleans, it’s time to strap on your comfortable shoes and don some beads. As we begin to gear up for the healthcare IT conference at least one event, the Health IT Venture Fair and Strategic Partner Forum, offers a sense of the trends in the sector such as natural language processing, compliance tools for meaningful use and ICD-10, and ways to speed up information retrieval. Here are seven of the more interesting ones:
Natural language processing
Health Fidelity is a big data company in Menlo Park, California, and is among a group of health IT companies focusing on natural language processing that has found a way to access patient data by mining unstructured information in the clinical notes section of e-records. The goal is to improve accuracy and save time by reducing the need to do manual coding. It won a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation earlier this month.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
Compliance
SA Ignite wants to be the Turbo Tax of meaningful use reporting. Its Meaningful Use Assistant is an automated system for helping providers comply with meaningful use requirements. It can help set exclusion criteria for each stage of meaningful use. It also has a compliance scorecard so providers can see what areas where they need to improve. Its MU Assistant also includes an attestation section that helps providers prove they have met meaningful use requirements to get government reimbursements.
Interoperability/automated referral
Forcare provides software for health information exchanges. It is adding an electronic referral management tool to exchange referral and clinical information when a patient is referred by primary care physician to a hospital or clinic. The New Zealand-based company opened its first North American office in Toronto earlier this month.
Informatics in Context is not part of the venture fair, but this Boston, Massachusetts-based company has a cloud-based automated prior authorization and electronic referral tool. The prior-authorization process includes appropriate use criteria to determine medical necessity, with prior authorization approval codes passed along to the billing stage. The goal is to reduce the number of denials, increase productivity by reducing phone call follow-ups. Referring physicians and specialists share a real-time view of the referral transaction.
Healthcare IT for nursing homes/assisted living
Ehealth Data Solutions started out as a company that used minimum data sets data — used to evaluate the condition of residents in Medicare- or Medicaid-certified nursing homes in a system it developed called CareWatch. It has since admitted a couple more programs. Risk Watch is designed to help facilities improve their care process and conform to reporting guidelines by helping users flag up problematic events, spot trends and to remedy problems to reduce the risk of future occurrences. Its Readmission Watch helps users track acute care readmissions, track rate of re-entry assessments, review admissions and discharge assessments, and length of stay between admissions and discharges. It helps identify residents at risk and monitor diagnosis trends.
Clinical trial adherence
iRX Reminder combines a cloud-based control center and an app to help clinical trial managers monitor medication adherence in real time. Using a cloud-based control center, researchers can deliver customized surveys, educational information and medication reminders customizable surveys, education programs and medication reminders to a study participant’s smartphone through an app. On the other side, patients can transmit things like medication tracking, exercise, emotional state, weight, blood pressure to researchers using the app.
Preventing medical errors
LifeMed ID tackles the problem of ensuring patient identity from the point of registration and point of care. Its smart card technology claims to to verify patient identity to make patient registration and discharge easier, increase privacy and prevent duplicate records.
