SAN DIEGO -- At the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Meeting in San Diego, MedCommons, Inc. launched a new service today that marks a new chapter in universal and secure access to patient medical information. MedCommons Emergency CCR, a new emergency patient-centric Continuity of Care Record (CCR), provides critical information about medications, past surgeries and allergies to hospital physicians in case of emergency. The CCR is easily accessible via a standard web browser and a convenient username and password provided by the patient or other approved individual.
Until now, personal health records were proprietary, tied to a particular enterprise and of widely variable quality. Adrian Gropper, MD, Chief Science Officer for MedCommons, said, "The launch today of our Emergency CCR solves a critical consumer outreach problem by using an ANSI-recognized standard with the potential of connecting all patients to all providers. A patient's relevant medical history can now be accessed at the click of a mouse from our secure and independent website (http://www.medcommons.net/) with the patient able to manage privacy controls to suit their individual situation."
David Kibbe, MD, Director, Center for Health Information Technology for the American Academy of Family Physicians, said, "It is critically important that personal health data are 'freed' -- in the sense that they are mobilized from proprietary databases -- and then placed under the control of individual patients and their personal physicians and providers via EHR and PHR technologies. The secure solutions for point-to-point and single-sign-on multi-site and network exchange of relevant health information in the MedCommons demonstration should help many people visualize the national health information network based on open standards of the future."
The exchange of sample patient records using the MedCommons medical record transport service, The Commons, and Records for Living's HealthFrame(TM) personal health record (PHR) can be viewed live at the HIMSS '06 Booth # 7411.
"We're excited to add emergency-access support to the suite of services available to HealthFrame users," says Simone Pringle, President of Records for Living. "The HealthFrame personal health record is a consumer directed healthcare tool that serves as a gateway to a wide variety of health services and decision support tools. Integration with MedCommons Emergency CCR allows our customers the benefits of a desktop decision support system with the anywhere, anytime availability of an Internet-based service."
In addition to the free Emergency CCR, MedCommons products include a full range of CCR storage and transmission tools as well as tools to enable secure CCR-based communications of scanned PDF documents and DICOM diagnostic imaging studies. MedCommons integrates with any CCR-enabled EHR and PHR solution as well as CCR-enabled labs and radiology centers and supports advanced single- sign-on capabilities based on international-standard Liberty Alliance privacy protocols.
Bill Donner, CEO of MedCommons, said, "We feel the Emergency CCR is an important first step in broader adoption of Personal Health Records by patients around the US." Donner added, "Security and privacy are critical elements to this process and we believe we have developed the only secure and private, yet accessible solution in the marketplace today."
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