MEDecision completes latest round of interoperability tests with other leading EHR vendors

MEDecision, Inc., a leading provider of collaborative healthcare management solutions, today announced the successful completion of its latest round of interoperability tests with other leading electronic health record (EHR) vendors at the 11th Annual Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) North America Connectathon recently held in Chicago.

“We are very proud of our Connectathon results, and we will leverage them to continue advancing technical innovation in collaborative health care technology in new and exciting ways.”

IHE, the healthcare information technology (HIT) industry’s premier effort to ensure seamless data interchange between medical information systems, conducts annual Connectathons in Asia, Europe and North America. The events enable HIT vendors to test the ability of their technologies to seamlessly interface and exchange data with one another on the basis of open industry standards. The Connectathons are intended to promote standards compliance, electronic health record system connectivity and the interoperable exchange of patient health information.

This year’s testing involved the latest extensions developed by the industry to enable more effective sharing of clinical data both within health information exchanges and between multiple local or regional HIEs. MEDecision’s products now feature proven support for:

• Cross-enterprise document sharing for imaging using web services (XDS-I.b)
• Cross-community patient discovery (XCPD)
• Document subscriptions (DSUB)
• Multi-patient query (MPQ)

MEDecision, through HxTechnologies, has successfully participated in numerous prior Connectathons, developing and commercializing the industry’s most comprehensive set of IHE-compliant health information exchange components that currently support:

• Patient identity cross referencing (PIX v2/v3)
• Patient demographics query (PDQ v2/v3)
• Cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS, XDS-I, XDS-MS, XDS-LAB, XDS-SD)
• Cross-community Access (XCA)
• Cross-enterprise user assertion (XUA)
• Audit Trails and Node Authentication (ATNA)
• Basic Privacy and Patient Consent (BPPC)

Combined, these capabilities give MEDecision customers the ability to seamlessly connect multiple EHRs and clinical applications from the industry’s leading vendors to build exchanges that can range in scope from local to national and international scope.

“Since its inception more than two decades ago, MEDecision’s primary guiding principle has been the belief that interoperability and collaboration are our best means for improving healthcare,” said Scott A. Storrer, president and CEO at MEDecision. “We are very proud of our Connectathon results, and we will leverage them to continue advancing technical innovation in collaborative health care technology in new and exciting ways.”

This year’s Connectathon featured more than 150 systems from over 100 participating organizations. In all, more than 3,500 successful tests of IHE Integration Profiles were performed and verified at the event.

MEDecision will be further showcasing its interoperability capabilities at the Interoperability Showcase during the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HiMSS) 2010 Conference and Exhibition, March 1–3 in Atlanta, Georgia.