Prognosis HIS Electronic Health Records Solution Empowers Three Additional Hospitals to Qualify for Incentive Funds

HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Three critical access hospitals in Texas have crossed the meaningful use finish line, qualifying for their share of the government's $27 billion incentive fund. Parkview Hospital, Stonewall Memorial Hospital and Throckmorton County Memorial Hospital successfully broke the tape far ahead of the pack by leveraging an electronic health records system from Prognosis Health Information Systems.

"We originally started exploring electronic health records and implemented the solution because it was the right thing to do for our patients and for our hospital from a clinical and operational standpoint," said Ann Fagan-Cook, CEO at Parkview, a 16-bed hospital in Wheeler, Texas. "But I was so happy to be one of the first hospitals to get that official notification from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying that we 'won.' The fact that we have now qualified for incentive funds is simply the icing on the cake."

To qualify under the Medicare program, the hospitals demonstrated 90 consecutive days of meaningful use of certified EHR technology through the submission of data for 14 mandatory core set objectives and five out of 10 menu set objectives as well as required clinical quality measures via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Attestation System.

A meaningful use dashboard in the ChartAccess® Comprehensive EHR enabled the hospitals to continually monitor their progress in relation to the various measures that they had to meet to verify meaningful use. The tool made it possible to move through the qualification process efficiently.

"The dashboard highlighted every component of meaningful use and would tell us if we were passing or failing," said Calvin Hargrove, an emergency medical technician who spearheaded the meaningful use initiative at 14-bed Throckmorton. "With the automated scorecard, the nurses and other clinicians knew exactly what they needed to do or to correct to meet the government's requirements. It saved many hours by eliminating the need to search through the electronic charts to figure out what steps to take."

A shared web-native EHR system delivered via a cloud computing model, ChartAccess software applications are made available as a service over an encrypted health information network. Intuitive and easy-to-use, the system offers built in analytics and health information exchange (HIE) capabilities, which can help hospitals provide consistent, high-quality patient care.

"We are offering a 'disruptive innovation' that provides a viable alternative to other options by providing a platform that helps community hospitals overcome the cost, speed of implementation, and usability obstacles commonly cited as impediments to electronic records success," said Ramsey Evans, CEO of Prognosis Health Information Systems. "Our solution makes it possible to not just get an EHR installed but to quickly tap into the technology to improve care and operations."

With Throckmorton's success, all four of the founding members of the West Texas RHIO, an innovative collaborative initiative in which all participating organizations are implementing the same remotely hosted EHR, have now met the government's Stage 1 requirements. The on-going technical and operational support from Prognosis has been an integral factor in reaching this milestone, according to Michael Curtis, CEO at Throckmorton.

"Prognosis was incredibly hands-on in supporting our success, meeting with us every week and providing a help-desk to enable us to work through each meaningful use requirement as quickly as possible," Curtis said. "The hard work of the Prognosis team and our super users are what really helped us to attest so early. It's truly a testament to what can be accomplished with the right technology, the right approach and a real team effort."

About Prognosis Health Information Systems

Prognosis Health Information Systems (PHIS), Houston, aims to improve the quality and safety of patient care through ChartAccess, a certified Comprehensive EHR. Designed to be fully operational in less than six months at a predictable, affordable cost, the solution enables hospitals to meet meaningful use and improve patient outcomes by leveraging built-in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) milestone and quality measure tracking functionality. PHIS uses 21st-Century technologies to offer small community hospitals a pure browser-based system that can run on-premise or in the cloud. For more information, go to www.prognosishis.com.

SOURCE Prognosis Health Information Systems