Henry Ford Health System and VisionIT Announce Unique Mobile Healthcare Communication Tool

CareTrail is a patient-centered, secure mobile communication platform that combines the most popular features from social media without compromising patient privacy. Using a smartphone or other mobile device, clinicians can engage in real time "Twitter like" communications regarding patient care at any time, from any location. And similar to Facebook, the care team creates an individual "page" for each patient that can store the entire secure conversation as long as necessary. It can also be interfaced with most electronic health records.

"It's more important than ever for a patient's care team to have a truly mobile communication tool that's completely secure and protects our patients' privacy," said Bruce Muma, M.D., chief medical officer for the Henry Ford Physician Network. "As a caregiver, I'm truly excited that we finally have the ability to capitalize on the advantages of mobile technology to focus care in a more individualized and efficient way."

CareTrail was created and developed through a collaboration between Henry Ford Innovations, a division of Henry Ford Health System, and VisionIT. "Our belief is that patient-centric care requires effective communication by the extended care team dedicated to that patient and we built CareTrail in support of that premise," said Paul Toenjes, senior vice president of VisionIT. "We are very pleased with the CareTrail product being launched and believe that our approach to collaboration provides us with a very differentiated offering in this space because of the extensions beyond simple messaging. We have plans to extend those capabilities to also address population health, patient monitoring and patient management. There is much more to come."

In addition to use at Henry Ford, CareTrail is now available to any hospital or health system, homecare agency, or other professional medical group. It offers additional workflow optimizations including:

• On-call scheduling that lets clinicians know which care team members are available at any given time
• An external invitation feature that enables a clinician to securely invite another medical professional to join a patient's care team
• A designated place for clinicians to leave care instructions for each patient

"We have been so proud to partner with such a visionary and innovative team as VisionIT," said Mark Coticchia, vice president and chief innovation officer for Henry Ford Health System. "They have taken Henry Ford's innovative clinical approach and translated it into an elegant digital solution. CareTrail has the potential to impact patient care for years to come." 

VisionIT and Henry Ford also partnered with Microsoft in the development of CareTrail, selecting the Cloud-based operating platform Microsoft Azure. "VisionIT has been very sensitive to the performance and security needs surrounding patient health information and HIPAA compliance," said David Segura, chief executive officer of VisionIT. "We are impressed with the capabilities of Microsoft Azure and are certain it will provide CareTrail with the levels of scalable performance and security we require."

In conjunction with the product announcement, Microsoft has selected VisionIT and Henry Ford to perform the first public demonstration of CareTrail in the Microsoft Innovation Theater at HIMSS 2017, the largest annual healthcare IT conference in the U.S. Their presentation will take place in the Microsoft booth on Feb. 20 at 3:15 PM ET in Orlando, FL, the site of this year's conference.

More information on CareTrail can be found at www.caretrail.io and www.visionit.com.

SOURCE Henry Ford Health System