Marketing Update
Oacis HIE from TELUS to Connect South Carolina Emergency Departments
Time critical data exchange expected to improve patient safety and reduce costs region-wide
Montreal, PQ and Charleston, SC, November 10, 2009 – TELUS Health Solutions today announced that the Carolina eHealth Alliance (CAeHA) has selected the company’s health information exchange (HIE) product, Oacis HIE, to electronically connect patient records across twelve disparate emergency departments (ED), initially, throughout the Lowcountry region of South Carolina.
“We’ve been helping care delivery organizations for many years to successfully aggregate disparate data though our Oacis Health Integration Platform,” commented Marc Filion, chief operating officer and general manager, TELUS Health Solutions. “Our HIE deployment option uses many of the hallmark “open-architecture” characteristics found in the Oacis Clinical Data Repository (CDR), yet enables information exchange under a federated data model instead of a centralized CDR model,” continued Mr. Filion. “We are thrilled that CAeHA has chosen us for this very important regional undertaking.”
Oacis HIE will deliver a variety of benefits to the CAeHA. With quick and simple access to key patient information, clinicians expect a significant reduction in redundant testing as well as duplicative treatments; thus saving money while improving care quality and patient safety. With the growing pressure of high ED volumes, faster throughput will decrease the lag period for records from outside the hospital which contributes to reduced wait-time for patients. A long-term goal of the information exchange is the overall improvement in public health outcomes as well as more effective disaster preparedness.
“CAeHA members unanimously felt the Oacis HIE solution was the most impressive,” said David Dunlap, CEO of Roper St. Francis Healthcare and CAeHA’s governance committee chairman. “The Oacis solution fit well with the alliance’s early vision. Dr. Raymond Greenberg, president of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), initiated our efforts around improving the quality of healthcare across the region through an enabling technology that links caregivers, though a common system, with key patient data,” continued Mr. Dunlap. “As a by-product, an improved patient experience combined with reduced care delivery costs are anticipated region-wide. The Oacis project aligns perfectly with CAeHA’s goals.”
At the core of the Oacis HIE platform is the company’s organically developed enterprise master person index (EMPI), designed specifically to simplify the identity management complexities of healthcare delivery, particularly across disparate facilities and systems. The Oacis EMPI, in combination with the web-based Oacis Clinical Viewer, will provide each of the alliance’s ED departments with a means to accurately identify patients and quickly aggregate/consolidate key electronic portions of their medical records from participating institutions. Examples of such information are: Emergency Department/clinic notes, discharge summaries, lab/pathology and radiology results, care/referral data, Rx and e-prescriptions, problems lists, and more.
“When I arrived as CEO of East Cooper Regional Medial Center in the fall of 2008, I had a vision that the care we provide to our immediate community would ultimately touch the broader region,” said Janie Sinacore-Jaberg, CEO East Cooper Regional Medical Center, a participating member of the alliance. “Through the Oacis HIE solution, the first phase of this vision is becoming a reality by interconnecting our regional emergency departments. It’s a win-win that is collaborative care at its best,” concluded Ms.Sinacore-Jaberg.
About CAeHA
The Carolina eHealth Alliance exists to provide South Carolina citizens with more effective and efficient delivery of healthcare services through networked systems that share patient-specific information. By testing and studying this data exchange across all phase 1 emergency department access points, the participating hospitals will continue to evaluate the benefits of expansion in patient data as well as in health system facilities and geography. Participating care delivery organizations presently include: MUSC’s ED sites at three different hospitals: the main hospital’s ED, the new Ashleigh River Tower ED, and the Pediatric Hospital’s ED. Additional sites include: two Roper St. Francis Healthcare ED facilities, and the EDs at Summerville Medical Center, Trident Medical Center, East Cooper Medical Center, as well as the New East Cooper Medical Center.
About Oacis
The Oacis family of EHR solutions provides healthcare organizations and entire regions with a flexible Health Integration Platform. Based on a breakthrough open-architecture design, and including an integration gateway, an EMPI, and gold-standard CDR, Oacis is ideally suited for data aggregation.
Oacis’ built-in interoperability, scalability, and configurability enable several flexible deployment modes. For multi-site delivery organizations (and/or HIEs) that require a shared longitudinal perspective, the Oacis Unified Patient Record option provides all the benefits of a web-based clinical portal with the advantages of comprehensive data integration. The newly announced Oacis Health Information Exchange (HIE) option, enables disparate entities access to key patient information while at the same time protecting data ownership. For sites that wish to add-on advanced clinical capabilities such as computerized practitioner order entry (CPOE), clinical documentation, and ED tracking, Oacis can be deployed as a cost effective clinical EMR; whereby the vast majority of existing IT investments can stay intact. Furthermore, the optional Oacis Health Data Warehouse application provides administrators as well as researchers and clinicians with sophisticated BI/Analytic tools; all from a common platform.
About TELUS Health Solutions
TELUS Health Solutions is a leading provider of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for the health industry. We develop, implement and manage healthcare applications, ICT processes and industry consulting services that optimize the efficiency of caregivers, drive better decisions, and foster prevention in the health system. For more information about TELUS, please visit telushealth.com.
About TELUS Corporation
TELUS (TSX: T, T.A; NYSE: TU) is a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, with $9.6 billion of annual revenue and 11.9 million customer connections including 6.4 million wireless subscribers, 4.1 million wireline network access lines, 1.2 million Internet subscribers and more than 100,000 TELUS TV customers. Led since 2000 by President and CEO, Darren Entwistle, TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services including data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, entertainment and video. In support of our philosophy to give where we live, TELUS, our team members and retirees have contributed $137 million to charitable and not-for-profit organizations and volunteered more than 2.6 million hours of service to local communities since 2000. Nine TELUS Community Boards across Canada lead our local philanthropic initiatives. For more information about TELUS, please visit telus.com.
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For media inquiries, please contact:
Stacey Masson
TELUS Media Relations
514 977-8766
Stacey.masson@telus.com
For CAeHA
David McNair
843 971-6060
david@themcnairgroup.com