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New Patient Safety Measures Accelerated TheraDoc(R) Growth in 2007

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 12:00 CDT

TheraDoc, Inc., a Salt Lake City-based clinical informatics company that develops and implements real-time electronic surveillance and expert clinical decision support systems designed to enhance medical decision making saw significant growth in 2007.

The Company's rapid revenue growth has been driven in part by a broad range of healthcare organizations choosing TheraDoc as their preferred knowledge solution. These organizations range from small forward looking rural hospitals to large and complex academic and multi-facility healthcare organizations, all looking for the best technologies to aid in their pursuit of medical excellence. Many of these facilities are recognized as healthcare quality leaders by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4), and other healthcare quality groups. These hospitals have chosen to implement the TheraDoc clinical decision support solutions, including TheraDoc's Expert System Platform® (ESP), the Infection Control Assistant® (ICA) Antibiotic Assistant® (AA), Adverse Drug Event Assistant® (ADEA), Clinical Alerts Assistant® (CAA), Rounds Assistant®, (RA), Intervention Assistant® (IA) and EZ Alerts Assistant™ (EZA).

The real-time surveillance, identification, guidance, bench marking, and reporting technologies developed by TheraDoc help hospitals prevent and control infections, alert clinicians to adverse events and changes in patient condition, select evidence-based treatments and meet state-mandated reporting of hospital-acquired infections (HAI). They also help organizations reduce the associated costs and improve financial outcomes.

New Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) reimbursement guidelines along with increasing state - and federally - mandated reporting requirements in 2007 added to provider initiatives to drive demand for TheraDoc technologies, a trend that is expected to continue as these same market forces strengthen and accelerate in 2008. For example, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation (ACT 52) requiring hospitals to adopt an electronic surveillance for infectious disease prevention and control. This initiative and the CMS non-reimbursement of costs associated with eight never events (three infectious diseases) resulted in a 68 percent increase in number of hospitals licensed for TheraDoc solutions in Pennsylvania.

Hospitals in 30 states and the District of Columbia have licensed TheraDoc technology to provide continuous patient-safety surveillance and real-time, patient-specific advice for tens of thousands of beds and close to 30 million inpatients and outpatients. Clients using the TheraDoc technology platforms include academic medical centers, community hospitals, children's hospitals, cancer specialty facilities, VA Hospitals and integrated delivery networks.

2007 Milestones at a Glance

On May 1, 2007, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued US patent 7213009 for "Systems and methods for manipulating medical data via a decision support system" and on June 12, 2007, the USPTO awarded TheraDoc a second patent, US patent 7230529, for "System, method, and computer program for interfacing an expert system to a clinical information system."

Version 4.0, the newest release of the TheraDoc Expert System Platform® (ESP) was designed and has been launched to meet the security and functional requirements of multi-facility and IDN customers through enhanced data access, security, scalability, and reporting features. This software is currently installed or is being implemented in five of TheraDoc's many IDN clients, representing 35 hospitals, with 11 in production, including CHS, Lifespan-Rhode Island Hospital, and OSF.

The University of Utah - Public Health Program, one of the top 10 programs of its kind in the country, entered a long-term partnership with TheraDoc to support the University's Public Health curriculum. The TheraDoc Public Health Education Endowment, a $10,000 gift, was contributed to teach core courses in the University's Public Health and to bring in a distinguished lecturer each year as the endowment grows.

TheraDoc sponsored a Webinar hosted by Healthcare Informatics with information presented by CMS and UPMC that addressed quality of care and Medicare reimbursement changes to help hospitals understand the impact of the latest Medicare changes and the role IT can play in helping to reduce and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and other medical errors. During the original live broadcast, nearly 1,000 healthcare professionals from a variety of hospital departments, including hospital CIO's, risk managers, quality improvement staff, IT managers, CFO's, infection control practitioners, Medicare/Medicaid compliance staff, chief medical officers, and other C-level executives, were educated about the recent Medicare hospital reimbursement reforms.

About TheraDoc

TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, efficiency and safety of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. It provides innovative, best-in-class solutions that improve clinical and financial outcomes at a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most-respected healthcare institutions in the country. With clinical transparency, TheraDoc's technologies seamlessly place mission-critical knowledge at the clinician's fingertips, helping them to confidently manage multiple processes of care across multiple conditions and diseases. The company's strict adherence to medical informatics standards enables connectivity and interoperability with any hospital's disparate health information systems.

Founded in 1999, TheraDoc designs, develops and supports a suite of clinical decisions support technologies utilizing inference engines that enable its real-time solutions. TheraDoc's founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in medical expert systems. Their experience in clinical decision support design and development spans two decades. On the Net: www.theradoc.com.

Source: Business Wire

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