A German renal therapy company is partnering with a U.S.-based healthcare IT vendor to offer a Web-based electronic health record designed specifically for nephrologists.
Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co., based in Bad Homburg, Germany, is the world’s largest renal therapy company, providing dialysis treatment to over 160,000 patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) worldwide. The company has entered into an agreement with Danville, Va.-based Health IT Services Group to license the latter’s EHR software and market it to nephrologists in the United States.
The new specialty-specific EHR will be called Fresenius Medical Care CKD Solutions, and will be available via an application service provider (ASP) model. The software includes clinical data capture, e-prescribing, and performance reporting capability.
According to Mats Wahlstrom, co-CEO of Fresenius Medical Care North America, the EHR will populate a RenalNet CKD Consortium data registry, providing a tool for additional research and understanding of CKD.
“This technology will enable nephrologists to monitor and further improve CKD patient outcomes,” Wahlstrom said. He noted that nephrology practices needed a specialized EHR to capture and report data for quality improvement and pay-for-performance programs.
Under the agreement with Fresenius, Health IT Services Group will provide training to physician practice groups using the nephrology-specific software, and will also offer ongoing support services.
“The ability of nephrologists to effectively care for [chronic kidney disease] patients is dependent upon reliable and integrated clinical data,” said Frank Maddux, MD, one of the founders of Health IT Services Group. “The electronic health record is a user-friendly product that efficiently captures clinical health care documentation, provides nephrology decision support, and offers physician practice management tools.”
The partnership between Fresenius and Health IT Services Group could be a harbinger of the future of EHRs, as vendors develop software focused on the needs of various medical specialties.
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology also anticipated this trend, when it announced last November that it would expand certification to include electronic health record products specific to medical specialties.
