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Medicity Receives 3rd U.S. Patent for Health Information Exchange Technology
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Technology Enables Physicians and Other Health Care Providers to More Easily Identify, Locate and Securely Share Patient Health Records
Salt Lake City, UT -- Medicity announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company a patent for technology that enables secure and effective identification and exchange of electronic patient health records among authorized care providers. The patent is the third that Medicity has received in the last two years for its HIE technology. The technology allows competing health care organizations to share patient information to improve care quality -- while ensuring that only authorized caregivers can access their patients' health information -- without requiring them to mix their data with other organizations in a single, centralized repository.
The health care industry is focused on creating community health records that offer physicians a complete view of their patients' medical histories -- regardless of where the patients received care in the past -- enabling more informed and efficient patient care. An important and challenging aspect of creating a patient's electronic health record is the ability to gather health data from hospitals and other health care sources and ensure it is associated with the correct patient. For example, Whitepages.com lists 5,106 people named "Maria Ramirez" in California alone. Keeping track of the right Maria Ramirez is essential for a physician trying to gain a complete view of her medical history from records held by hospitals, physician practices, laboratories, pharmacies and other healthcare providers.
The patent # 8,095,386 issued to Medicity covers the technology and method of securely locating, indexing, matching and sharing patient records between health care organizations -- ensuring the right records are associated with the right patient while enabling each organization to maintain control of its own data.
"This latest patent acknowledges the value of our innovative technology in enabling health systems to look beyond the four walls of their own organization and participate in community-wide collaboration around a patient's care," said Ashish Shah, senior vice president and chief architect at Medicity. "The system and method we invented is tuned specifically for community collaboration, better equipping providers and other key stakeholders to respond to a rapidly changing health care environment."
Medicity's technology enables each health care organization participating in a health information exchange to tune its patient-matching rules -- which may include telephone numbers, addresses, insurance numbers, and license or identification numbers -- without affecting the rules configured by other organizations within that network. It also helps networks identify and prevent creation of duplicate records, improving accuracy and integrity of data.
About Medicity Medicity is the leading innovator and largest provider of HIE technology -- with more than 750 hospitals, 125,000 physicians and 250,000 end users in its connected ecosystem. Medicity's solutions empower hospitals, physicians and HIEs with secure access to and exchange of health information -- improving the quality and efficiency of patient care locally, regionally and nationally. For more information, please visit http://www.medicity.com or follow us on twitter.com/Medicity.
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