Press Releases
RelayHealth Announces Interoperability Toolkit, Connecting Service to Leading Electronic Health Record and Practice Management Systems
Expanded interface capabilities link secure, payor-reimbursed online communications system to growing list of vendors, streamlining physician record keeping while boosting patient convenience and access
Emeryville, CA, July 21, 2005 — RelayHealth, the nation's premier provider of secure online communication services linking physicians, patients, and payors, announced today the availability of its second generation interoperability solution: the RelayHealth Interoperability Toolkit. The Toolkit will streamline integration with leading electronic health record (EHR) systems and practice management systems (PMS).
As part of this initiative, RelayHealth and Allscripts have agreed to enable integration of their respective services in support of shared clients. Allscripts and RelayHealth will use an advanced Web-services based protocol to ease secure data exchange and facilitate clinical workflow. Allscripts clients in Florida, Massachusetts and California — all states where health plan reimbursement for RelayHealth webVisits® is in place and growing — have expressed interest in this integration model.
Other RelayHealth customers nationwide have already signed agreements to deploy the RelayHealth Interoperability Toolkit. Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, GA, Family Doctors LLC in Swampscott, MA, and The Marino Center for Progressive Health in Cambridge and Wellesley, MA, users of GE Medical's Centricity® EMR, plan to deploy the RelayHealth Interoperability Toolkit this quarter. Hill Physicians Medical Group, California's largest Independent Practice Association, and Family Care Partners in Jacksonville, FL have begun the process of interfacing the RelayHealth® service to the NextGen® EMR.
Additionally, eClinicalWorks has agreed to support the RelayHealth Interoperability solution for clients wishing to streamline message and data sharing between the RelayHealth® service and their EHR applications.
Built on a robust framework, the RelayHealth Interoperability Toolkit offers rapid, cost-effective deployment, using healthcare standards such as HL7 to enable customers to import, link and store RelayHealth messages in patients' electronic health records. The solution is highly flexible, and can work with a wide array of commercial and custom-built EHR applications.
"As a growing number of our clients begin to deploy EHR solutions, we have worked closely with them to connect their RelayHealth messages with their patients' electronic charts. Many have found it to be quite valuable to deploy RelayHealth in advance of their EHR initiative in order to get practices comfortable with the use of clinical applications, to pinpoint training needs, and to get an immediate return on their IT investment", said Giovanni Colella, MD, president and chief executive officer of RelayHealth. "When they are ready, they can connect these initiatives through our simple, reliable Toolkit to ensure that secure, clinical messages initiated on RelayHealth will become part of the patient's electronic chart." added Colella.
One such client is UC Davis Health System, which has deployed RelayHealth's interoperability solution to enable users of its EHR from Epic Systems to receive and store RelayHealth messages automatically without leaving the EHR system. RelayHealth also routes all electronic prescriptions written within the EHR through its RelayRx routing engine, ensuring delivery of legible, interaction-checked prescriptions at the patient's pharmacy of choice. "By being able to integrate different applications within our EHR, we've been able to retain the best of both worlds," says Thomas Tinstman, M.D., associate director for clinical information systems at UC Davis Health System. "Having more streamlined communication workflows, including a prescription routing service and the ability to bring health plan reimbursement for online visits, made good sense in the overall configuration of our selected EHR. We worked closely with our vendors to build effective interfaced solutions, and the benefits of those efforts are now being seen daily throughout out our health system."
At Hill Physicians, with over 700 physicians already deployed on RelayHealth and contracts with three health plans for coverage of the RelayHealth webVisit®, integration with RelayHealth was a requirement for their selected EHR. "We believe in the RelayHealth model of connected care," states Steve McDermott, chief executive officer of the 2,600 physician organization. "Enabling interoperability between RelayHealth and our selected EHR simply made good business and clinical sense," added McDermott.
CareGroup Healthcare System at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (an affiliate of Harvard Medical School) has also licensed the interoperability capabilities of RelayHealth in order to make secure, reimbursable webVisit services available to the doctors and patients using its PatientSite service. Through this program, RelayHealth webVisits are presented to users via PatientSite, and stored in CareGroup's own EHR.
Discussions are underway to add additional EHR and PMS vendors to the roster of RelayHealth Interoperability Partners with the next few months. With these partnerships, RelayHealth plans to expand the array of interoperability options, which include automated posting of webVisit charges to practice management systems, routing of alerts, reminders, lab results and renewal authorization requests to the clinician's RelayHealth inbox, synchronization of medication lists and display of patient records through the RelayHealth service. These new partnerships and the Toolkit features fulfill RelayHealth's vision of a safer, better connected, and more productive healthcare system, and an improved healthcare experience for all stakeholders.
About RelayHealth Corporation
RelayHealth is the premier provider of payor-reimbursed secure online healthcare communication
services linking patients, healthcare professionals, health plans, and pharmacies. A secure,
clinically structured productivity platform for the medical office, the RelayHealth service
is an emerging online communication standard, interfacing with both commercial and custom-built
electronic medical record systems through the company's Interoperability Toolkit. Research
studies show RelayHealth reduces phone traffic and increases physician productivity through
modular features like the webVisit® clinical consultation and
eScript electronic prescribing — one reason
leading health plans nationwide increasingly reimburse providers who use the RelayHealth
service. For healthcare consumers, RelayHealth improves convenience, access and communication
with their own doctors. For information, visit www.relayhealth.com.
