Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Mike Valentine, VP North American Sales
mike.valentine@mtuitive.com
508.771.5800

-May 20, 2010-

mTuitive and Stratford General Hospital Achieve 100% Compliance with CCO Standard

Boston, MA –In March, as part of the Cancer Care Ontario Synoptic Reporting project, Stratford General Hospital went live with mTuitive’s xPert for Pathology synoptic reporting system. Today, Cancer Care Ontario announced that Stratford General has reached 100% compliance with the 2008-2009 College of American Pathologist/Collaborative Stage-aligned data standard adopted by Cancer Care Ontario. The current standard, Phase I, includes five disease sites: Breast, lung, prostate, endometrium and colorectal. Standardized pathology reporting increases the availability and consistency of cancer pathology information that is essential for treatment decisions, evaluation, and research.

mTuitive complies with the 2008-2009 CAP/CS aligned data standard developed by Cancer Care Ontario in conjunction with the College of American Pathologists (CAP) Cancer Committee, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Joint Committee on Cancer. The CAP checklists¹ for breast, lung, colorectal, prostate, and endometrium were amended to include the mandatory pathologic collaborative staging elements.

xPert for Pathology interfaces with all available Pathology and Laboratory Information Systems on the market which lends itself to wide use throughout the province.  Other Ontario hospitals utilizing mTuitive’s xPert for Pathology synoptic reporting solution to meet the CCO data standard include Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, The Scarborough Hospital, North York General Hospital, Lakeridge Health, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Rouge Valley Health System, Bluewater Health, Peterborough Regional Health Centre, Cambridge Memorial Hospital and Sudbury Regional Hospital.

xPert for Pathology interfaces with all available Pathology and Laboratory Information Systems on the market which lends itself to wide use throughout the province. Other Ontario hospitals utilizing mTuitive’s xPert for Pathology synoptic reporting solution to meet the CCO data standard include Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, The Scarborough Hospital, North York General Hospital, Lakeridge Health, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Rouge Valley Health System, Bluewater Health, Peterborough Regional Health Centre, Cambridge Memorial Hospital, Stratford General Hospital and Sudbury Regional Hospital.

About mTuitive: mTuitive, Inc. develops data capture and synoptic reporting software to assist health care professionals in recording clinical findings and maintaining compliance with established protocols and guidelines. Our unique method of capturing structured information provides valuable data for pathology, oncology, and cancer staging applications. Established in 2003, mTuitive, Inc. is based in Massachusetts. See us on the Web at www.mtuitive.com.

1. This material includes the Cancer Checklists and Cancer Protocols which are copyrighted works of the College of American Pathologists. Encoded within the Checklists are portions of the copyrighted work of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization, SNOMED CT. © 1998-2007 IHTSDO. The Cancer Checklists and Cancer Protocols are used with permission of the College of American Pathologists – which has also authorized use of SNOMED CT as encoded in the Checklists.

For those of you whom are interested in Health Informatics and the concept of a Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO), the chapter except A RHIO Struggling to Form: Will it Get Off the Ground? from the book Transforming Health Care Through Information: Case Studies is now available.

The chapter definitely covers the issues surrounding technology and how it can be used to help improve healthcare.  But what’s even more interesting is the fact the process, committees, and organizational logistics that is required in order to get this to work.   It’s not just about getting the document standards to talk to each other and the computer systems to actually communicate using the same standards. 

One of the real keys was understanding all of the logistics to get this all to work.  It’s about understanding the politics, stakeholders, trust, leadership, culture, project management, and change management.  It’s about how to setup the teams of doctors, nurses, administrators, and IT personnel to work together and to motivate them to get them to work.  It’s also about how to get them all to communicate. 

Technology can be used to facilitate the communication and simplify the logistics – or it can be used to make things harder.  I hope the book chapter will help you do the former.

I’m worried that people coming to one of my sessions thinks I’m talking about social media. My presentation, called “Geek is Chic: Communicating and Promoting Technology in a Changing Healthcare World” is about how to tell your employees that their paper process will be automated.

Electronic medical records are being implemented all across the country, but so is Facebook and Twitter. The idea of an e-patient isn’t a patient who uses Facebook. It’s a patient who has a PHR and makes decisions using Web 2.0 tools. In order for a hospital to gear up for this shift in technology, you must first get the technology then brace yourself for change (that’s where I come ino).

Social media planning comes next. Those tools help empower your own patients, and hopefully they make the right decision to come to your hospital.

So I hope people don’t leaving half-way through the presentation as we talk about CPOE because they wanted to talk about Twitter. I’ll let you know if I’m boo-ed out of my presentation.

In order to be in compliance, laboratories have until August 1st, 2010 at which point they must have implemented and adopted the 2010 versions of the CAP Protocols & Checklists – which contain elements from the new AJCC Cancer Staging Manual. This new standard has long been an American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer requirement for Accredited Cancer Programs but CAP has now expanded these standards to all pathology-reporting laboratories.

Laboratory Directors must ask themselves several questions:

1. How can we quickly implement the checklists?
2. How will this affect pathologists’ workflow?
3. Will the synoptic reporting solution integrate with our MEDITECH pathology module?
4. Who is going to maintain new checklists whenever they’re released?

Pathologists must be engaged immediately to discuss what, if any, changes to workflow will occur.  The most efficient way for a laboratory to comply is by purchasing an electronic synoptic reporting system used directly by the pathologists.  The return on investment is immediate as a result of reduced transcription costs.  Pathologists also have the ability to sign a case out immediately, eliminating the need to review and edit a case.  Turn-around-time of pathology reports is greatly reduced and reports are noticeably more accurate and complete as a result of built-in logic and error checking.

When a laboratory purchases synoptic reporting software, the vendor should update and maintain the content of the CAP checklists as part of the annual maintenance and support agreement.  Laboratories should rest assured that no matter what changes the CAP makes, their vendor will implement them within days to weeks.

If, while seeking an electronic synoptic reporting solution, you learn that it will be the responsibility of the laboratory to obtain the CAP checklists and build the application yourself, keep looking.  The amount of time required to build and, ultimately, maintain these checklists is prohibitive and more expensive than purchasing a software program.

For more information please contact me:

Mike Valentine
mTuitive Inc.
mike.valentine@mtuitive.com
508.771.5800

Stop by the mTuitive booth at the USCAP show and say hello to Colin Murphy (Vice President of Business Development) and Mike Valentine (Vice President of North American Sales).  Ask Colin or Mike to give you a demonstration of Pathology 3.0, our latest development in the world of structured data capture for pathologists.  Pathology 3.0 handles not only synoptic reporting requirements for CAP cancer reporting, but also provides pathologists with a way to report diagnosis findings in a synoptic format.  You can also learn more about our synoptic reporting solutions for gross pathology and our flagship product xPert for Pathology.  To learn more about the USCAP, please visit their website.

I’m getting pretty geeked out for stuff like this. I’m on the selection committee at my hospital for new CCTV system, and patient touch technology got rolled up into that. This software I believe was actually created in house by our own IS department. The smaller community hospitals I think benefit more than my own, though. We have more than 1,000 beds, and I’m just not sure all patients even know how to use a computer. But having the technology available is still beneficial for many patients and especially our staff.

It’s difficult to manage patient care for such a diverse population. You want to make it as easy as possible for them, but even as a very technologically advanced hospital, some patients like old-school ways. They like having paper orders in their hand for the lab. They like bringing the paper prescription to the pharmacy. Not everyone trusts “the system.”

Nothing beats having your doctor, nurse and care team tell you about your care though – in person. Having a nurse go over your post-surgery instructions isn’t old school, it seems ideal to me. Having that available through a computer is almost a necessity though simply because it’s a time saver. We improve technology, but saying it improves care is arbitrary, I realize. I’m  as Generation-Y as they come, and I try to limit my human interaction if I can get the info online or on my phone, but when it comes to my health, sometimes it’s hard to trust a machine.

Meanwhile, we still want digital signage for employees, patients and visitors, patient way-finding, and a system where employees can watch training videos and get the credit upon finishing. Recommendations welcome.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently released the results from the 2008 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), which is “an annual nationally representative survey of patient visits to office-based physicians that collects information on use of EMR/EHR.”  Approximately 5,200 physicians (3,200 surveys conducted in person; 2,000 over the phone) responded to this survey, which is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics since 2001.   The survey is designed to figure out how many physicians have purchased some product to serve as the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) – also referred to as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) – and how many are utilizing those products.

There has been a big push for adoption of electronic health records, especially since the government set a goal of having most Americans have an EHR by 2014 (set in 2004 by then President George W. Bush, and has been re-affirmed by President Obama).  Increased funding from the Department of Health & Human Services for electronic medical records and products that electronically capture health information has also led to a boom in the Health IT industry and a diversity of options for health professionals from which they can choose.

But such an abundance of choices combined with the rush to adopt EHRs has left many people wondering – what’s the best product out there? Perhaps the better question is – what’s the best approach for implementing this new system?

Survey results, rising doubts and some ideas after the jump…

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