A Medical Device Daily

Healthlink (Houston), a privately held, provider-focused healthcare information systems consulting firm, reported that it has been selected as part of the Unisys (Blue Bell, Pennsylvania) team to provide worldwide training services for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Composite Health Care System II (CHCS II) initiative.

The work will be performed under a DoD Systems Integration, Design, Development, Operations and Maintenance Services III contract. The value of the Healthlink subcontract is for about $18 million over four years for training of CHCS II worldwide, including the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America.

CHCS II is the DoD's comprehensive dental and medical clinical information system that manages the healthcare information of military personnel across all branches of the service on a worldwide basis. The core capability of CHCS II is to generate and maintain a comprehensive, life-long, electronic medical record for each member of the military and to provide real-time, around-the-clock, secure access to this record at the point of care.

Healthlink was chosen by Unisys to assist the DoD in the training of healthcare personnel for implementation of Block I functionality of the system. Block I encompasses outpatient clinical documentation and supports encounter documentation, health history, order entry and patient alerts.

Sentillion (Andover, Massachusetts), a provider of identity and access management solutions to the healthcare industry, reported that New York University Medical Center (New York) has gone live on Sentillion's identity and access management solution, Vergence.

NYU Medical Center is leveraging Vergence to achieve stronger security, patient privacy and caregiver access via a Citrix environment that includes Eclipsys, GE Healthcare and homegrown applications.

“With the decision to deploy Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager XA for CPOE [computerized physician order entry], we looked to Sentillion to help us integrate our various clinical applications into an integrated patient record using Vergence's single sign-on security and patient context-sharing capabilities,“ said Paul Conocenti, vice president of information technology at NYU Medical Center.

“Sentillion's Vergence product has reduced the amount of time it takes our caregivers to sign in and access the complete patient record and allowed us to roll out the new Sunrise Clinical Manager system by clinical specialty, thereby avoiding the risk of a 'big bang' implementation,“ Conocenti said. “Vergence was deployed quickly throughout our facility, and we look forward to continuing our rollout to all clinical providers in the coming months.“

NYU Medical Center, which went live on Vergence in less than four months, selected Sentillion as part of its migration to Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager XA. Vergence provides single sign-on and context management capabilities between Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager XA, GE's Logician and a self-developed electronic data repository.

Vergence will be used at all three NYU Medical Center facilities — the Tisch Hospital, the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine and the Hospital for Joint Diseases.

NotifyMD (Nashville, Tennessee) was selected for the Practice Partner Program by the Michigan State Medical Society (MSMS; East Lansing, Michigan) organization representing 14,000 physicians throughout the state. Chosen as the provider of after-hours answering service and daytime call management service for MSMS' Practice Partner Program, NotifyMD will offer their communication services to all MSMS Physicians through this new relationship.

“Through extensive market research in the answering service industry, we have found that NotifyMD is the best medical-only vendor of after-hours answering service and daytime call services for our physician practices and we are confident that they will provide the highest quality service that our physicians expect,“ said Janet Foreman, business practice ombudsman for MSMS.