San Diego, Dec. 2, 2009 - As hospitals and medical groups implement electronic medical records (EMRs) and e-prescribing to meet the government's 2011 incentives deadline, they'll have one less obstacle to overcome with Anvita Health's newly patented approach to rapid patient medical history capture.
Anvita Health, founded in 2000, is a clinical analytics company that analyzes available patient data to improve health care quality and lower costs. Its analytics output ranges from real-time advanced clinical decision support (CDS) to in-depth population analysis and risk stratification.
Anvita Health's input method leverages automated access to a patient's medication history to offer one-click entry of the patient's past and current diagnoses. This information is critical to maintaining an accurate and up-to-date problem list, which is likely to be an important "meaningful use" criterion for health information technology (HIT) systems as defined this year by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Solving What Will Soon Be a Common Problem
"The implementation of EMRs and e-prescribing presents a mountain of challenges to the provider, not the least of which is populating the EMRs with patient medical histories," said Ahmed Ghouri, M.D., chief medical officer and co-founder of Anvita Health. "Anvita Health deals in clinical data every day, and we recognized that this patient data could be securely leveraged to effectively populate an EMR, and streamline its deployment and use."
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, an individual physician may have from 2,000 to 6,000 patients, with each patient potentially having multiple diagnoses. With this in mind, a physician may have to search for tens of thousands of diagnoses and enter these into a health record which is a formidable undertaking.
"A patient's medication history is often a clear and accurate reflection of his or her past clinical diagnoses," said Ghouri. Anvita Health's new medical history input method for EMRs allows the end-user to input a medication which then triggers a list of relevant diagnoses associated with the medication. With a single mouse click, the end-user selects the diagnosis without having to search for the exact term used by coding dictionaries, such as ICD-9, saving substantial time.
Added Benefit of Improved Patient Safety, Superior Medication Reconciliation
Anvita Health's approach has the added benefit of facilitating drug safety, and supporting medication reconciliation, a formal process of identifying a complete and accurate list of a patient's medications and using that list to provide correct medications for the patient anywhere within the health care system that patient may be seen. Medication reconciliation also helps prevent duplicate therapies because prior medicines may be been auto-renewed.
"Capture of a patient's prior diagnoses is critical to drug safety because dangerous interactions can be detected before medications are dispensed," said Ghouri. "Associating an active medication with a diagnosis - an important aspect of medication reconciliation - forces the caregiver to consider the reason a medication is being continued. In some cases, the illness might have resolved on its own, in which case the medication is no longer necessary."
About Anvita Health: Founded by physicians in 2000, Anvita Health provides innovative health care analytics to its customers who, in aggregate, manage more than 50 million lives. Anvita Health's analysis engine and custom analytics solutions are used by point-of-care information technology systems, health plans, pharmacy benefit managers, disease management companies, personal health record providers, and ambulatory care providers. Anvita Health is headquartered in San Diego, California.