Equicare Health and Lexington Medical Center collaborate on oncology integration project

Vancouver, CANADA – August 23, 2017– Equicare Health Inc., the leading supplier of Oncology care coordination solutions, teams up with Lexington Medical Center to expand integration to include Enterprise Electronic Health Record (EHR) information. The new integration gives customers using an enterprise EHR the opportunity to integrate data from their EHR Medical Oncology Information System with Equicare’s Care Coordination system (ECS).  For organizations running one Oncology Information System (OIS) or a variety of vendor systems in many locations, Equicare serves as a bridge to consolidate data, manage compliance, and engage patients. The system streamlines data flows and allows patients and care providers to securely access data 24 hours a day, regardless of treatment location.

“When we recently switched our Medical Oncology system, we worked with Equicare to add support for integration to our Epic enterprise EHR,” says Jo Anne Covar, Director of Integration and Development at Lexington Medical Center. “With this integration now in place, we can consolidate patient data in ECS from the OIS systems used in both our Medical and Radiation Oncology departments. Our partnership with Equicare has allowed us to meet our goals of providing a robust navigation and survivorship program that operates across Oncology, minimizes duplicate data entry, and embeds clinical best practices.”

“Two additional collaboration projects with Equicare are pending as well. One will be to develop a single-sign-on (SSO) solution between the Equicare Patient Portal – which is designed for oncology patients – and our EHR enterprise portal. The second project will be to design and implement some additional integration points between the two portals using the new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard,” adds Covar. “This will provide enhanced navigation and improved portal access capability in order to give our oncology patients a more seamless experience.”

The new feature contributes to the automated creation of oncology-specific survivorship care plans by extracting demographic, appointment, staging, chemotherapy, and hormone data from a customer’s EHR Medical Oncology Information System. When combined with existing functionality and data extracted from other OIS systems, the need for extra HL7 interfaces is dramatically reduced. The Equicare integration with this EHR provider will give customers more options for managing Oncology care coordination.

“We’ve been providing rich integration with other OIS systems for some time. By adding support for an EHR Medical Oncology Information System, we provide more options for customers requesting to use Equicare’s navigation and survivorship tools across their Oncology practice,” says Margaret Nash, VP of Global Sales at Equicare Health. “We are pleased to be in a position to close this gap for them and can’t thank the team at Lexington Medical Center enough for their leadership in this area.”

About Equicare Health
Equicare Health is the industry’s leading provider of comprehensive care coordination solutions.  Equicare’s flagship solution EQUICARE CS™ (ECS) is a Multi-facility web-based software tool that facilitates patient engagement including patient reported outcomes, patient navigation, survivorship care and a number of other clinical tools, i.e. MDT, Clinical trials, a suite of educational material, etc.. In additional to the clinical toolset, Equicare also offers an administrative suite of worklists and reports for managing adherence to accreditation standards including Meaningful Use, Commission on Cancer (CoC), NAPBC, QOPI, OCM, etc… ECS enables cancer centers to influence clinical outcomes for patients, optimize revenue streams, and increase operational efficiency. www.equicarehealth.com

About Lexington Medical Center
Lexington Medical Center is a 428-bed hospital in West Columbia, South Carolina. It anchors a health care network that includes six community medical centers and employs a staff of more than 6,500 health care professionals. The network also has cardiovascular and oncology care affiliated with Duke Health, an occupational health center, the largest skilled nursing facility in the Carolinas, an Alzheimer’s care center and 60 physician practices. Lexington Medical Center operates one of the busiest Emergency departments in South Carolina, treating nearly 85,000 patients each year. The hospital delivers more than 3,500 babies each year and performs more than 23,000 surgeries. Lexington Medical Center is currently undergoing the largest hospital expansion in South Carolina history by creating a new patient tower that will open in 2019. Lexington Medical Center has a reputation for the highest quality care. www.lexmed.com

For more information, please contact:

Celina Lam
Marketing Communications Specialist
celina.lam@equicarehealth.com
604.398.2956

Doing the Right Thing in the Era of MACRA: The Role of Care Coordination

Concerns over the cost of health care and apparent lower health outcomes in the United States compared to other developed countries have significantly influenced program development by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). New reimbursement strategies intended to address cost and drive quality—specifically the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA)—are placing new clinical and operational demands on the health care industry.

So in the era of MACRA, providers need to balance reporting requirements (which can be time-consuming) while continuing to put patients first. One of the best ways to do this is to ensure patient care is well coordinated.

Read more

Value-Based Care Requires Good Big Data, Better Communication

Brevity may be the soul of wit in the literary world, but it’s the opposite of a good thing when it comes to safe, comprehensive, and cost-effective patient care.

In the value-based care environment, where multiple entities may be financially responsible for the same patient’s long-term outcomes, thorough communication between care providers is essential for ensuring that services aren’t unnecessarily duplicated or accidentally forgotten as individuals move across the care continuum.

Read more

Equicare Health adds support for interoperability with Varian’s ARIA 15.1

Vancouver, CANADA, July 27, 2017Equicare Health Inc., the leading supplier of comprehensive care coordination solutions, extends support for Varian’s latest release of ARIA – version 15.1.

“The underlying security model in ARIA has fundamentally changed, and we’ve updated Equicare to support these new requirements,” says Malcolm Wright, VP of Product Management at Equicare Heath. “This update ensures that customers can continue to use Equicare with current as well as prior versions of ARIA. It also demonstrates our continued commitment to support interoperability with all oncology system vendors.”

Equicare has been a primary provider of its comprehensive care coordination system (ECS) and patient portal (APP) to oncology centers worldwide. Through an established reseller agreement, Equicare has been providing additional capability, resources, and support to enhance Varian’s care solutions. Equicare and Varian continue to work together to provide the highest level of integration to their customers.

ECS and APP support real-time integration with multiple Oncology Information Systems (OIS) including Elekta’s MOSAIQ and Varian’s ARIA. This integration allows customers to consolidate up-to-date, structured data for patients. Customers can range community cancer centers to large academic institutes as well as multi-site enterprises running a variety of systems.

This latest release adds support for ARIA version 15.1, with security enhancements that better protect patient data and simplify provider authentication using Active Directory.

About Equicare Health
Equicare Health is the industry’s leading provider of comprehensive care coordination and patient navigation solutions. Equicare’s flagship solution EQUICARE CS™ (ECS) is a multi-facility web-based software tool, which enables cancer centers to influence clinical outcomes for patients, optimize revenue streams, and increase operational efficiency. ECS facilities Patient engagement through patient reported outcomes, patient navigation, and survivorship care. The software provides other clinical tools (including MDT, Clinical trials, education material, and patient engagement) as well as an administrative suite of worklists and reports for managing adherence to accreditation standards (including Meaningful Use, Commission on Cancer (CoC), NAPBC, QUOPI, OCM). To learn more, please visit www.equicarehealth.com.

For more information, please contact:

Celina Lam
Marketing Communications Specialist
celina.lam@equicarehealth.com
604.398.2956

MACRA rule adds EHR flexibility, pushes back mandate for 2015 editions

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday delivered a 2018 MACRA proposed rule that would add more flexibility to the health IT mandates associated with the law.

The proposal pushes back the requirement that clinicians use 2015-certified electronic health records for another year. Instead, doctors can continue to use legacy systems if they choose and those that opt to use 2015 editions would get a 10 percent payment bonus from CMS.

Read More…

Equicare Health and Elekta announce Vendor Interoperability Program partnership

Vancouver, BC – June 22, 2017 – Equicare Health Inc., the leading provider of oncology care coordination software, is pleased to announce a strategic partnership and Vendor Interoperability Program (VIP) with Elekta, a leading innovator of equipment and software used to improve, prolong and save the lives of people with cancer. This partnership will provide seamless interoperability between EQUICARE CS™ (ECS) and Elekta’s MOSAIQ® oncology information systems.

Read more

Pop Health Data Needed for Future Patient Engagement Tech

Healthcare professionals are increasingly looking into patient engagement technology solutions that help them determine how and when to best engage a healthcare consumer, according to a report from Black Book Research.

The report includes testimony from nearly 750 industry leaders, including chief information officers, chief financial officers, and hospital managers. Ninety percent of respondents said that patient engagement technology will dominate their population health management tools going forward.

Read More

Ready to Rocket lists Equicare Health as one of the top digital health companies of 2017

Vancouver, CANADA – March 14, 2017 Equicare Health Inc., the leading supplier of comprehensive care coordination solutions, has been named as one of the top digital health companies in Rocket Builder’s 2017 Ready to Rocket list. The list highlights technology companies with the highest growth potential in the sectors of Digital Health, Information and Communications Technology, Cleantech and LifeSciences.

Read more

Over a Decade of Excellence in Oncology Patient Navigation & Care Coordination

At Equicare Health, a group of driven healthcare professionals, engineers, scientists and business leaders come together with a passion for innovative oncology solutions. They are on a mission to improve the lives of cancer patients and survivors around the world. With the help of their industry-leading software, Equicare CS (ECS), currently serves cancer centers, oncology care providers and patients across the globe.

ECS is a comprehensive approach to care coordination with unrivaled Oncology Information Systems (OIS) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) integration. It is designed to provide healthcare professionals with the necessary tools to coordinate patient care from screening, through treatments, survivorship and follow-up.

To learn more, please visit the website and request a demo today.

*Infographics and Design by Ann Wong, who holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. She is an author of over 10 SCI publications, having taught at UBC and the Peking University Health Science Center (PUHSC) in Beijing. 

Exploring patients’ roles in chronic illness care coordination

Strong care coordination is one of the core necessities for effective chronic disease management.

Patients managing a chronic illness are confronted with a plethora of health information, often coming from multiple different specialists and primary care clinicians. All of this information must be sent from one clinician to the other, with each doctor knowing what the other is doing to achieve the end goal of patient wellness.

Read more

Top