Clinical Solutions partners with Health Language
- 18 November 2008
Clinical telephone triage software specialist Clinical has announced a partnership with Health Language Inc. (HLI), the US-based supplier of language engine technology for medical vocabulary.
It is hoped the new partnership will to improve patient care and efficiency by standardising clinical record coding.
The partnership will see the HLI Language Engine integrated into the clinical decision element of Clinical Solutions’ triage applications, including systems for telephone triage and face to face consultations, and new applications for the urgent care sector.
Standardised medical terminology has been identified as a critical element to ensuring advanced interoperability among healthcare IT applications. This contributes to improved patient safety, superior clinician decision-making capabilities and rapid reimbursement.
Commenting on the agreement, Richard Craven, director at Clinical Solutions, says, "The role of standardized coding is critical to the ability for healthcare IT applications across the globe to work together, ensuring that risk is minimized and patient safety improved.”
Craven added standardised coding will be a key feature of Clinical Solutions’ forthcoming applications for the urgent care market, developed in line with the policy aims of the English NHS Next Stage Review, which aims to bring care closer to the patient.
“Lord Darzi’s Review will see more services made available at the right times and right places convenient to the patients. These centres will bring together a number of different services and therefore different clinical systems, all interacting more efficiently thanks to the HLI technology," said Craven.
Marc Horowitz, HLI’s senior vice president, said: "This partnership ensures that Clinical Solutions will provide clinicians with automatic, real-time updates and mappings from all major standards bodies and terminologies, as well as free text interpretation to ensure true interoperability, accuracy and standardization between hospitals, regions and countries."
Clinical Solutions’ customers include; NHS Direct in England and Wales; NHS 24 in Scotland; and many walk-in centres across England, as well as customers in North America, Portugal, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. The company says its solutions are now used to serve over 100 million people across the world.
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