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Siemens Enhances Knowledge-Driven Solutions to Support Provider Quality of Care Initiatives

Posted on: Monday, 6 April 2009, 08:00 CDT

The latest tools help hospitals increase data transparency for quality improvement.

CHICAGO, April 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Siemens Healthcare (www.siemens.com/healthcare) will focus on knowledge-driven solutions and quality of care with Soarian(R) Quality Measures, enabled by the REMIND(TM) Platform, at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago (Booth #2036).

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070904/SIEMENSLOGO )

"Healthcare IT and data transparency are at the forefront of the public's interests," said Mark Wofford, vice president, Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) and Knowledge Solutions, a part of the Image and Knowledge Management business unit, Siemens Healthcare. "Healthcare organizations face challenges in ensuring excellent quality patient care, while complying with the most current clinical and medical best practices. Soarian Quality Measures helps the organization support the Quality Imperative and timely submission process for tracking core measures, by automating the chart abstraction process."

Knowledge-driven solution

Soarian Quality Measures, enabled by the REMIND(TM) (Reliable Extraction and Meaningful Inference from Non-structured Data) Platform, is a Knowledge-based application that replaces time-consuming manual chart reviews with highly accurate and automated chart abstraction according to customer-defined criteria for current and future quality measures, as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and The Joint Commission.

The application presents quality measures results in a simple, intuitive interface, allowing the end user to quickly review and validate findings by extracting and combining all available patient information from both structured data, such as demographics and financial information, to unstructured free text, like those found in clinical documentation and transcribed reports. Soarian Quality Measures supports external medical domain knowledge, such as CMS program quality measure guidelines, and provides suggestions to providers' conclusions based on probabilistic inference.

Knowledge in action

Reading Hospital and Medical Center, an 800-bed not-for-profit healthcare center located in West Reading, PA, joined the growing list of medical facilities using advanced decision support technology to create efficiencies and orchestrate clinical best practices when they contracted to serve as one of Siemens' customer beta sites for Soarian Quality Measures in 2007.

"We are excited about the abstraction time improvements garnered through the use of Soarian Quality Measures," said Jay Raman, chief information officer (CIO) of The Reading Hospital and Medical Center. "The application further reduces the dependency on manual chart abstraction, while improving the accuracy and speed of abstraction."

Since its initial installation at Reading Hospital, Soarian Quality Measures has "gone live" at four more sites nationwide. An additional 17 US healthcare organizations are currently contracted for Soarian Quality Measures installations in the near future.

Knowledge enabler

The REMIND Platform is a new generation data-mining tool, featuring the ability to analyze all available patient data, including the ability to leverage free text. The offering supports provider quality-of-care initiatives and advanced-data analysis, and is designed to analyze patient data from both Siemens and non-Siemens' IT systems, including unstructured free text, demographics, and financial data, to extract high-quality clinical information.

The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry. The company is a renowned medical solutions provider with core competence and innovative strength in diagnostic and therapeutic technologies as well as in knowledge engineering, including information technology and system integration. With its laboratory diagnostics acquisitions, Siemens Healthcare is the first integrated healthcare company, bringing together imaging and lab diagnostics, therapy, and healthcare information technology solutions, supplemented by consulting and support services. Siemens Healthcare delivers solutions across the entire continuum of care - from prevention and early detection, to diagnosis, therapy and care. Additionally, Siemens Healthcare is the global market leader in innovative hearing instruments. The company employs more than 49,000 people worldwide and operates in 130 countries. In the fiscal year 2007 (Sept. 30), Siemens Healthcare reported sales of euro 9.85 billion, orders of euro 10.27 billion, and group profit of euro 1.32 billion. Further information can be found by visiting http://www.siemens.com/healthcare.

SOURCE Siemens Healthcare

Source: PR Newswire

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