July 30, 2007 - Outcome Sciences Inc., a medical software developer, announced that it has added a Continuity of Care Records (CCR) functionality to the its Get With The Guidelines (GWTG) Patient Management Tool (PMT), a data collection and reporting platform for patients with coronary artery disease (CAD), heart failure and stroke, as part of a joint effort with the American Heart Association to improve patient care.
The CCR is a standard specification being developed jointly by ASTM International, the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The addition of the CCR to the GWTG CAD, heart failure and stroke platforms is intended to foster and improve the continuity of patient care, reduce medical errors and assure at least a minimum standard of health information transportability when a patient is referred or transferred to another provider. The CCR is being developed in response to the need to organize and make transportable a set of basic patient information consisting of the most relevant and timely facts about a patient's condition. These include patient information, patient's health status (e.g., allergies, medications, vital signs, diagnoses, recent procedures), and recent care provided.
Outcome’s web-based PMT for data collection and reporting works with the American Heart Association’s GWTG programs and is designed to enable healthcare providers to consistently treat patients with the most updated treatment guidelines. The improved PMT supports the exporting of patient records in the CCR standard XML format. This XML document reportedly can be shared electronically with other electronic health record (EHR) systems and allows for the CCR to be viewed and printed in PDF format.
“The Continuity of Care Records will allow Get With The Guidelines to communicate in-hospital patient data directly to the patient or to their referring physician,” said Gregg C Fonarow, M.D., national chairman of the GWTG Steering Committee and director of Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center. “As a result, we think this will help improve communications between the physician and patient as well as maximize the patient’s quality of care.”
For more information: www.outcome.com and www.americanheart.org