Powerful Real-Time Medication Reconciliation Solution Supports Hospitals’ Efforts to Maintain and Improve Patient Safety
ANI HEALTHCARE FINANCE CONFERENCE, SAN DIEGO, June 25, 2007 — Ingenix, a leading health information technology company, today announced the launch of MedPoint for Hospitals, a web-based tool that enhances hospitals’ medication reconciliation efforts by providing an individual’s detailed prescription history in real time. Secure and fully compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates, it can help hospitals enhance patient safety with accurate medication profiles, reduce administrative costs associated with procuring that data, and benefit from rapid web-based deployment. Ingenix will demonstrate the capabilities of MedPoint for Hospitals at ANI - The Healthcare Finance Conference at booth 803.
“Visibility into patients’ medications is the foundation for the medication reconciliation process, and MedPoint for Hospitals now provides that information in real time at a fraction of the cost of compiling it manually,” said Steve Greenberg, senior vice president of Ingenix.
Delivered as a service over the web, MedPoint for Hospitals was built to help hospitals comply with the 2006 recommendations of the Joint Commission’s “Patient Safety Goal No. 8,” which urges institutions to “accurately and completely reconcile medications across the continuum of care.” Proprietary technology allows access to real-time information from up to 19 data suppliers — one of the most comprehensive pharmacy claims data aggregation systems available, as well as the prescribing physician and dispensing pharmacy demographics. MedPoint aggregates medication history on 220 million individuals into a single system that continually updates, checks, and re-checks the data for integrity. The net result is a comprehensive medication chronology that will help mitigate preventable adverse drug events and reduced administrative costs.
The Challenge
Medication reconciliation is a key initiative in hospitals today. With more than 35 million hospital admissions, 110 million emergency room visits and approximately 920 million ambulatory visits in the United States every year, manual medication reconciliation methods are fraught with difficulties.
Gathering patients’ medications and matching that list against physicians’ admission, transfer, and discharge orders is a manual, multi-step process that adds to the workload of hospital administrative and clinical staff. According to estimates from The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, poor communication of medical information at the transition points within facilities is responsible for as many as 50 percent of all medication errors and up to 20 percent of hospital-based adverse drug events.
“As a practicing ER physician, I cannot overstate to you the value of knowing a patient’s medication profile at the point of care,” said Tom Darr, M.D., chief medical officer of Ingenix Business Solutions. “Administering the wrong drug or waiting precious hours to find out if a particular drug is appropriate for a patient can mean the difference between a positive outcome for your patient or a series of expensive and time-consuming complications. With MedPoint for Hospitals, we can call up a patient’s profile instantly, match the information with the patient’s clinical condition and history and proceed with confidence at full speed.”
Product Overview
Ingenix’s MedPoint for Hospitals combines robust data with analytic intelligence to help hospitals improve the accuracy of medication reconciliation by providing a list of claims for prescriptions filled by a patient including drug, dosage, frequency, and route from 19 different pharmacy-related databases. These detailed reports include a patient’s prescription history including fill dates and specific drug details. In addition, MedPoint leverages a proprietary database containing physician information to match a provider’s Drug Enforcement Administration identification number to prescriptions and delivers the prescribing physician’s demographic information as well as dispensing pharmacy information. Hospitals can then use this information to improve communication among administrative and clinical staff, providers, and patients to mitigate drug interaction events at all transition points within the facility.
Speed, Accuracy, and Security Enhance Administrative Savings
While manually procuring medication history from multiple sources is a time-consuming and costly process, a single MedPoint request initiates simultaneous queries to multiple data sources and distills the results in a single report.
MedPoint for Hospitals allows users to easily order a patient’s MedPoint profile online in three simple steps:
- An authorized hospital representative submits a request through MedPoint.
- The resulting prescription list is validated with the patient and/or providers.
- The validated prescription list is accessible at any computer in the hospital that has web access.
While Medpoint for Hospitals can be integrated into existing hospital IT systems, its instant web accessibility can substantially decrease the time and cost of integration. MedPoint for Hospitals helps institutions comply with the 2006 recommendations of the Joint Commission, specifically its Patient Safety Goal No. 8, which urges institutions to “accurately and completely reconcile medications across the continuum of care.” Additionally, Ingenix employs exacting security measures in the storage and transmission of MedPoint data to maintain strict adherence with all U.S. privacy and confidentiality regulations governing protected health information, including HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
About Ingenix
Ingenix, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), transforms organizations and improves health care through information and technology. Organizations rely on its innovative products, services and consulting to improve the delivery and operations of their business. More information about Ingenix can be obtained at http://www.ingenix.com. | 
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