Health Language HIMSS Presenter Discusses Two High-Interest Areas for Improving Quality of Care
Brian Levy, M.D., chief medical officer (CMO) and senior vice president of Health Language, Inc.® (HLI), the world’s leading supplier of language engine technology for medical vocabulary, discussed two key technologies for maximizing healthcare information technology at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference. Dr. Levy presented “The Essential Role of the Hospitalist in the Use of HIT” and co-presented “From Speech Recognition to Standards to Decision Support” with Nick van Terheyden, M.D., CMO for Philips Speech Recognition Systems. HIMSS, the largest healthcare IT conference in the world, is being held Feb. 24-28, 2008, in Orlando. (Visit Health Language at booth #7983.)
The explosive growth of hospitalists, which are expected to surge from 20,000 at the present time to 30,000 by 2010, creates some unique challenges for maximizing the use of healthcare information technology. As specialists who deliver care to hospital inpatients, many hospitalists work at more than one hospital, and different hospitalists may see the same patient over a 24-hour period. Each hospital may have its own electronic health record (EHR) or may not have fully transitioned from paper. Hospitalists and the hospitals where they treat patients would benefit from portable technology to improve the collection of patient data, billing information and physician record sign-off.
Dr. Levy provided a case study that described how a hand-held PDA-based solution satisfied the data requirements of a hospitalist group for pay-for-performance (P4P) data, reduced billing errors and helped improve the group’s efficiency and ability to provide high-quality care. For example, the PDA-based application allows the physician to record basic patient and hospital information, select SNOMED CT and procedure visit codes and map this information to ICD-9-CM to facilitate appropriate billing. These databases can be beamed or emailed between group members and are sent daily to a central computer and billing company.
Drs. Levy and van Terheyden discussed how converting speech into structured data provides a wealth of decision-support information at the point of care. The presentation described how speech recognition technology can ease reporting times, deliver higher quality reports quickly and increase the utility of technology already deployed but underutilized within a hospital. They explored how the latest generation of speech-recognition technology can transform spoken text into codified data to generate clinically actionable information.
About Health Language Inc.
Aurora, Colo.-based Health Language, Inc.® (HLI) develops and delivers state-of-the-art software solutions that automatically incorporate medical vocabulary and coding standards into healthcare information technology (HCIT) applications. HLI’s Language Engine® (LE®) allows centralized access to medical terminology standards and generates mappings to create a common pool of standardized codes and concepts that enhance patient safety, facilitate clinical outcomes analysis and accelerate reimbursement. It also provides standards for modeling, storing, updating and distributing information consistently for interoperability between hospitals, regions and countries. LE solutions seamlessly integrate with EHRs for clients such as Cerner, McKesson, Misys, Partners Healthcare and Great Britain’s National Health Service. For more information, visit www.healthlanguage.com or call 303.307.4400.
About Royal Philips Electronics
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE:PHG, AEX:PHI) is a global leader in healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle, delivering people-centric, innovative products, services and solutions through the brand promise of “sense and simplicity”. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips employs approximately 123,800 employees in more than 60 countries worldwide. With sales of EUR 27 billion in 2007, the company is a market leader in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems, energy efficient lighting solutions, as well as lifestyle solutions for personal wellbeing. News from Philips is located at www.philips.com/newscenter.
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