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Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Taps Thomson Healthcare to Improve Clinical Performance and Standards Compliance

Posted on: Monday, 19 March 2007, 12:01 CDT

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo., March 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Clinicians at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif., are transitioning from their homegrown infobutton search application to InfoButton Access(TM), the healthcare market's first commercial infobutton solution, to improve clinical performance and adherence to industry standards. InfoButton Access is provided by Thomson Healthcare, part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), and the leading provider of healthcare decision support solutions to improve clinical and business performance outcomes.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is one of the largest nonprofit academic medical centers in the Western United States, licensing 848 beds and serving five counties in Southern California. According to Robert A. Jenders, M.D., M.S., associate professor, Department of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine, and informatician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the health institution invests heavily in adhering to clinical and regulatory standards and core measures that drive outstanding clinical performance.

"Cedars-Sinai is a four-year user of homegrown infobuttons and an eight- year customer of Thomson Healthcare evidence-based knowledge," said Dr. Jenders. "Our leadership team views InfoButton Access from Thomson Healthcare as a key next-step in leveraging standards-based health information technology applications to continuously improve clinical performance expected by our patients, payers and regulators."

InfoButton Access is an Internet or intranet-based and context-aware knowledge search and retrieval technology solution that integrates easily with clinical information systems. Infobuttons facilitate immediate access to evidence-based knowledge within clinicians' workflow at the point-of-care, helping them to quickly find answers to patient care questions. An article in last year's Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) reports Boston-based Partners Healthcare found that infobutton technology satisfied clinicians' information needs about medications and significantly altered patient care decisions nearly 15 percent of the time.(1)

InfoButton Access from Thomson Healthcare will provide Cedars-Sinai physicians and other clinicians with patient-specific and context-sensitive links from medications, laboratory tests and other data that appear in a patient's electronic health record (EHR) to relevant drug, health and disease management and laboratory test knowledge. This rapid access to vital information can help avert adverse drug events (ADEs), improve the use of laboratory testing and results interpretation, and optimize disease treatment strategies-ultimately resulting in improved outcomes.

"Medication queries, more so than medical literature and laboratory tests, are the most documented knowledge searches online using infobuttons, accounting for 83 percent of clinician queries in recent months," said Dr. Jenders.

InfoButton Access is being implemented within Cedars Sinai's homegrown application called the Web Viewing System (Web/VS), a browser-based portal to the clinical data repository that stores acute care and ambulatory patient information from the hospital's ancillary systems. Clinicians across the health enterprise can access online authoritative Thomson Healthcare clinical knowledge using the infobutton tool at any time that they are using Web/VS to view patient data.

"Contextually relevant clinical information accessible through infobuttons is proving value in helping to improve outcomes by satisfying clinicians' information needs at the point of care," said Jay Katzen, senior vice president, Thomson Healthcare. "We are proud and honored to partner with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center as they advance their efforts to improve patient outcomes. By deploying InfoButton Access to link context-specific knowledge queries directly to the patient's EHR, clinicians at Cedars-Sinai will have true and tailored information results that will assist their patient care decisions."

About Thomson Healthcare

Thomson Healthcare is the leading provider of integrated decision support solutions that help healthcare organizations improve clinical and business performance. Through the ability of its solutions and products to combine real-time access to patient-specific information and care recommendations with powerful benchmarking and analytics Thomson Healthcare helps its customers drive actionable results that improve profitability, growth, quality of care and patient satisfaction. Thomson Healthcare is part of The Thomson Corporation (http://www.thomson.com/), a global leader in providing essential electronic workflow solutions to business and professional customers. With operational headquarters in Stamford, Conn., Thomson provides value-added information, software tools and applications to professionals in the fields of law, tax, accounting, financial services, scientific research and healthcare. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC).

1: JAMIA, Volume 13, Number 1, Jan/Feb 2006. Article: "KnowledgeLink: Impact of Context-Sensitive Information Retrieval on Clinicians' Information Needs"

Thomson Healthcare

CONTACT: D. Nikki Wheeler, Thomson Healthcare, +1-303-486-6031,Nikki.wheeler@thomson.com

Web site: http://www.thomson.com/solutions/healthcarehttp://www.thomson.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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