The Arkansas Department of Health has selected Orion Health Rhapsody Connect for Public Health to be deployed at four pilot site hospitals for reporting of CSTE-defined reportable cases and influenza case reports.
Other public health case reports, eventually more than 80, will be subsequently provided, based on an implementation schedule outlined by Arkansas. The goal of this project is to improve case completeness and timeliness of cases reported to ADH. For this pilot project, the ADH has recruited Jefferson Regional Medical Center, St Edwards Mercy Medical Center, St Bernards Medical Center and Baptist Health Medical Center.The Arkansas Department of Health has been using the Rhapsody Integration Engine since 2002 and recognized the advantage of deploying Rhapsody Connect as an additional resource providing health workers across the state a better picture of patient health and providing clinical decision making data to help them improve healthcare response and patient outcomes. Jim Files, Epidemiology Surveillance Section Chief with the Arkansas Department of Health, said: “We expect to see a significant increase in the timeliness and accuracy of data collected from health organizations across the state. By automating this process, we will be able to eliminate the heavy burden of manual reporting by health care providers at city, county and regional levels to better respond to the health needs of our state’s residents.” “We also predict an increase in our effectiveness in treating people who are infected, and preventing new cases of disease when we find out about a case as soon as possible,” continued Files. Messages from hospital systems, electronic medical records (EMRs) and laboratory systems are routed to Rhapsody Connect, which filters and maps the data, converting it to the specified format, and validating it before securely transmitting it to the designated public health agency. Rhapsody Connect provides built-in support for existing and emerging national standards and provides a toolkit that is configurable and extensible to support future public health initiatives. Paul Viskovich, President Orion Health North America and EMEA, said: “Freeing up physician time for reporting public health information means they have more time to treat patients. Rhapsody Connect is standards-based and interoperable with multiple formats which is critical as healthcare facilities look to adhere to the new interoperability specifications for electronic health records, data exchange and architecture recently laid out by the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel.” Rhapsody Connect for Public Health helps healthcare organizations meet local, state and federal public health reporting requirements by improving the accuracy and timeliness of transmitting public health data with minimal impact on healthcare provider or IT resources. Rhapsody Connect is the only solution designed specifically for healthcare organizations to provide fast and secure data transfer, customized for diverse public health reporting requirements such as laboratory test results, case reports, bios-surveillance, and immunization reports like the H1N1 influenza response. More than 45 states across the USA are using Orion Health integration technology to improve nation-wide data collection and tracking of reportable diseases making it one of the most widely adopted integration platform used by public health departments. Rhapsody is the primary integration product for a number of programs administered by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) such as the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Message Subscription Service (MSS) and BioSense.
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