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Start-Up Licenses University Patient Medical Software

EKG (Photos8.com)

(Photos8.com)

The Minneapolis-based start-up Omicron Health Systems Inc. has licensed software written at University of Minnesota for clinical decision making and networking across health-care providers. Financial terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.

Many electronic health care record systems were first designed for administrative purposes, such as billing and scheduling, and for use only by a single practice or institution. The Minnesota software, on the other hand, was written specifically to aid clinical decision-making and for the coordination of patient care among multiple health care service providers.

The university says the software helps ensure patients receive complete treatment. The system not only stores data, it has the ability to analyze  records and segments patients into groups according to their medical needs, which helps clinicians monitor patient progress and respond with targeted treatments or preventive care.

The university says it is also implementing the software, called Electronic Primary Care Research Network, in its Clinical and Translational Science Institute to support the institute’s research functions. The system has research-support tools to automate patient identification, analysis, treatment monitoring, and performance reporting. These tools support real-time communication and coordination among distributed networks of researchers and their partner clinicians.

Kevin Peterson, a Minnesota professor of family medicine and community health and inventor of the system, says the software was designed from the bottom up to encourage sharing among providers and thus improve the quality of care for patients. “It helps providers make better decisions about who needs medical care, and improves the ability of health care providers to identify when an individual is not getting medical care that could be important,” says Peterson. “The system standardizes information from electronic medical records, making it much easier to work with and to share between providers.”

Omicron Health Systems says its solution incorporates the University technology for health care providers and research networks to better coordinate care delivery and research activities across clinics. The company, the first organization to license the technology, says its platform makes it possible for clinics and research sites to securely transmit patient health records and other data in compliance with federal health-record privacy laws.

David DuChene, founder and CEO of Omicron Health, says the standards-based nature of the software ends up benefiting the patient. “With Omicron Health’s solution,” says DuChene, “the patient’s various providers are able to create a complete, shared medical record and coordinate their treatment to achieve the best result for the patient.”

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