MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/10/2012) —Clinical Decision Support technology developed by University of Minnesota researchers will enable healthcare providers to improve preventative care, communication and coordination among clinicians, researchers, and patients. Minneapolis-based startup Omicron Health Systems, Inc. will incorporate the technology in its Population Health Management offering to research networks and healthcare organizations.
Most patient record management systems available today predate the Internet and can be cumbersome to use. Many of the systems are built to serve administrative functions such as scheduling and billing, and are ill-equipped to support clinical decision-making or the sharing of data required to coordinate patient care.
Omicron Health's innovative solution, which incorporates the University technology, enables care providers and research networks to coordinate care delivery and research activities across clinics. Omicron Health provides a HIPAA-compliant platform that enables the secure transmission of patient health records and other data.
"This solution takes information out of an electronic record and reorganizes it to make it easier for a provider to use," says Kevin Peterson, the software inventor and a U of M professor of family medicine and community health. "It helps providers make better decisions about who needs medical care, and improves the ability of health care providers to identify when an individual is not getting medical care that could be important. The system standardizes information from electronic medical records, making it much easier to work with and to share between providers."
"Patients often see several doctors when they're sick and cross several organizational boundaries," says David DuChene, founder and CEO of Omicron Health. "Existing EHR systems were not designed to share data outside of the organization. With Omicron Health's solution, the patient's various providers are able to create a complete, shared medical record and coordinate their treatment to achieve the best result for the patient."
The University technology also helps ensure patients receive complete treatment. The system analyzes medical records and segments patients into groups according to their medical needs and helps clinicians monitor patient progress. Clinics can then reach out to patients with targeted treatments or preventative care.
Additionally, the technology will improve the process of performing clinical research by providing clinicians with the tools to automate patient identification, analysis, treatment monitoring, and performance reporting. These tools support real-time communication and coordination among distributed networks of researchers and their partner clinicians. This provides researchers with much more rapid and complete feedback from the clinicians administering the treatments and aids in the process of translating research to clinical application.
The University technology is also being implemented at the U of M's Clinical and Translational Science Institute to support research functions.
The research was funded by the NIH National Center for Research Resources and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The inventor collaborated with researchers at the University of Birmingham and King's College London to develop the technology, which was licensed to Omicron through the U of M's Office for Technology Commercialization.
The mission of the University of Minnesota's Office for Technology Commercialization is to translate University research into new products and services that provide growth opportunities for its licensees, benefit the public good, improve the quality of life and generate revenue to support the University's research and education goals.
Omicron Health Systems, Inc. is a startup company based in Minneapolis that is focused upon creating innovative, open-source technology solutions that provide the healthcare industry with standards-based solutions that support collaborative research and the coordinated, patient-centered delivery of care.