Shared Health® and Health Language Partner to Strengthen Medical Terminology Management, Demonstrate Meaningful Use

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. and DENVER, Feb. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Shared Health®, Inc., a leader in the health information technology (HIT) industry, and Health Language, Inc. (HLI), the global leader in medical terminology management, have announced a partnership that will use HLI's Language Engine in Shared Health's web-based applications and products.  This streamlined solution will help physicians, clinicians, patients and health systems demonstrate compliance with all three stages of meaningful use.

Under the agreement, Shared Health will use HLI's Language Engine within its health care applications to streamline the updating, mapping and distribution of standard controlled vocabularies and facilitate compliance with meaningful use regulations.

"HLI's terminology management solution provides mapping and access to all major code sets, which simplifies data exchange and integration with our broad array of applications," said Jana Skewes, chief executive officer of Shared Health. "This partnership will offer a robust solution for reaching meaningful use, reducing the overall cost of health care and fueling the improvement of patient outcomes at the point of care."

Shared Health applications and products using HLI's technology include:

• Shared Health® Clinical Xchange® – A platform that supports the delivery of Shared Health's solutions, including data exchange and interoperability, data transformation and normalization, clinical guidance and analytics, and security and privacy.
• Shared Health Clinical Health Record® (CHR) – A secure, web-based electronic health record application that aggregates and presents patient medical information to clinicians and other caregivers and offers valuable clinical decision support tools at the point of care.
• Shared Health Condition Tracker™ – This online registry is used to effectively track clinical indicators and care directed for specific medical conditions for a patient, across the entire care team.
• Shared Health Clinical Insight™ – Provides users and clinicians an interactive dashboard allowing users to effectively manage patient populations and performance under quality programs.

HLI's scalable, flexible Language Engine integrates and manages the latest medical terminologies with healthcare applications to enable effective and interoperable use of accurate clinical information, administrative codes, and consumer and provider friendly terminology. It provides access to current versions of more than 100 clinical and administrative code sets, including SNOMED CT, ICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM, LOINC, RxNorm and HCPCS, and allows incorporation and mapping of local content to standards.

According to HLI CEO George Schwend, "We are pleased that Health Language was selected to provide Shared Health with the content management tools that provide a broader reach for interoperability and seamless data exchange. Helping Shared Health create an infrastructure to accelerate early adoption of meaningful use compliance requirements will drive growth. We look forward to moving ahead with our common goal of creating a secure, national healthcare information network that will improve the quality of patient care and overall efficiency of our health care system."

About Shared Health

Shared Health was launched in 2004 with the mission to transform health care by offering secure, innovative health information technology (HIT) solutions. With the records of more than 3.5 million patients, Shared Health's web-based applications securely share and connect medical information across a patient's network of clinicians, including more than 5,000 clinicians in Tennessee, Mississippi and six other states. Shared Health strives to be the clinician's trusted partner for sharing relevant patient information at the point of care, enabling both health care professionals and consumers to improve outcomes. For more information on Shared Health, visit www.sharedhealth.com.

About Health Language

Denver-based Health Language, Inc. (HLI) develops and delivers state-of-the-art software solutions that automatically incorporate medical vocabulary and coding standards into health care information technology (HCIT) applications. HLI's Language Engine® (LE) allows centralized access to medical terminology standards and generates mappings to create a common pool of standardized codes and concepts that enhance patient safety, facilitate clinical outcomes analysis and accelerate reimbursement. It also provides standards for modeling, storing, updating and distributing information consistently for interoperability between hospitals, regions and countries. For more information, visit www.healthlanguage.com or call 720-940-2900.

SOURCE Shared Health(R), Inc.