Will Cloud Computing Create I.T. Jobs in HealthCare?
From: EHRWatch
The Health Record Review
by: Frank Irving
Posted on Mon, Sep 26, 2011 - 02:03 pm
A free service made available Sept. 26 by MediConnect Global gives healthcare providers the ability to host, access and exchange medical records in a cloud-based repository called the National Secured Archive (NSA).
MediConnect said physicians and other caregivers within a provider network can use the new service, the Provider Network Offering, to upload both digitized paper records and EMRs into the HIPAA-compliant NSA. The company noted that the NSA is the largest repository of its kind, with nearly 10 million records.
After the records are uploaded -- and at the physician’s request -- MediConnect’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) enables patients to access their health information using myMediConnect, MediConnect’s free online personal health record (PHR) portal. Patients and providers within the network can also authorize access to physicians outside the network as well as insurance payers, who can access the medical records through RapidRetrieve, the company’s workflow system for insurance providers.
“The Provider Network Offering for physicians is designed to alleviate their burden of managing the increasing demand for the release of patient medical records to health insurance payers and other authorized parties,” said Amy Rees Anderson, CEO of MediConnect. “Physicians who take advantage of this offering will be able to deposit patient records into the NSA and simply redirect any future requests for medical records to MediConnect for processing. All of this is done at no charge to the physicians.”
When paper medical records are digitized, uploaded and made accessible through MediConnect’s HIE, the system indexes the proper data elements so that the information correlates to the patient, the physician and the location of the physical record. Indexing also allows records to be delivered back to the physician, tagged for easier online access and made available to be imported into any EMR system. The NSA also gives providers a free option for securing an electronic backup of medical records.
“With our HIE, we are providing global access to medical records for authorized users as needed at each step along the healthcare process,” added Anderson. “By securely keeping this information centralized in the cloud, and allowing physicians and patients free access through our Provider Network Offering and the myMediConnect PHR, we are empowering individuals to take control of their own health and helping to improve patient care by giving physicians access to the critical information they need, when they need it.”