ATLANTA – With school back in session and flu season not far behind, Orion Health and Cisco are teaming up to help public health agencies and healthcare providers keep any flu outbreaks in check.
Orion Health, the New Zealand-based provider of clinical workflow and integration technology with an office in Santa Monica, Calif., has integrated its Rhapsody solution with the Application Extension Platform and Integrated Services Routers from San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco to create a pre-configured, secure solution for public health reporting.
The new medical data exchange solution, Rhapsody AXP, was unveiled at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Information Network PHIN Conference 2009 Monday in Atlanta. Company officials say Rhapsody AXP will allow healthcare providers to automatically share information with health agencies, partners and healthcare information exchanges.
“Rhapsody AXP helps health facilities of any size to contribute to the national preparedness effort by streamlining and automating the process for data exchange using PHIN standards to report to the CDC,” said Paul Viskovich, Orion’s president of North American and EMEA operations, in a press release. He said the platform will appeal especially to smaller clinics and remote healthcare providers.
Designed to be deployed with minimal IT resources within a hospital or clinic’s reporting system, Rhapsody AXP formats all relevant data so that it can be shared between offices and organizations or across regions, allowing the CDC and other federal, state and local agencies to detect patterns of common disease symptoms and identify outbreaks as they develop.
According to Kathy English, Cisco’s director of global healthcare solutions, the company’s AXP and ISR tools assist Rhapsody in meeting the demands of providers to transmit reports as well as receive public health alerts. The use of open-standards software, she added, allows Rhapsody to be integrated with most health information systems.
