News & Events

IN THE NEWS

OB Everywhere, Inc. Joins American Academy of Family Physicians’ Sponsored Continuity of Care Record Acceleration Task Force

Cleveland, Ohio – November 18, 2005 OB Everywhere, Inc. has joined the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) standard being developed within ASTM in order to enable healthcare providers to share patient information. CCR sponsors include ASTM International, Massachusetts Medical Society, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Medical Association (AMA), the Patient Safety Institute (PSI), the American Health Care Association, and the National Association for the Support of Long term Care which represent over 400,000 practitioners, over 13,000 IT professionals, over 200 IT companies, and over 12,000 institutions.

The CCR standard permits patient records to be prepared, transmitted, and viewed in such varied ways as in a web browser, in a secure email, and in any XML-enabled word processing document. Further, ASTM International and HL7 have signed a memorandum of understanding to achieve harmonization between ASTM’s CCR and HL7’s CDA, RIM, and EHR functionality standards.  The CCR makes transportable a set of basic information about a patient's health care that is accessible to clinicians and patients. It is intended to foster and improve continuity of care, reduce medical errors, and ensure a minimum standard of secure health information transportability.

In announcing their product’s ability to export CCR records to other systems, OB Everywhere, Inc. notes that: This functionality in our OB Secure® product, not only provides significant opportunities for our users to exchange their antepartum records with other clinical EMR systems, but also provides the foundation for our users to have interoperability between regional health information organization (RHIO) systems. Shortly, users can look at the CCR for providing efficient interoperability with best of breed systems. In the near future we will see a growth of specialized and varied systems such as medication prescription systems that alert to drug interactions as well as technologies such as ultrasound systems and practice management systems that can all share the same patient information.

Steven E. Waldren, MD, MS Assistant Director, Center for Health Information Technology, American Academy of Family Physicians said that “We believe the ability for systems to export patient information in CCR format will further accelerate adoption of EMRs as health care professionals realize the flexibility such a solution provides in true portability of patient records across devices and systems. People who have been holding off adopting EMRs because of uncertainty about the portability of their patient records in a proprietary system down the road, need to take a fresh look at the remarkable results being achieved in this arena today.”


OB Everywhere enters into agreement with BioEnterprise Inc.

Cleveland, Ohio - May 9, 2005 OB Everywhere, Inc. has entered into an agreement with BioEnterprise Corporation as part of its business development initiative. BioEnterprise is a business formation, recruitment, and acceleration initiative designed to grow bioscience companies. Companies include emerging medical device, biopharmaceutical, and health care services firms. BioEnterprise provides management counsel, clinical access, business development, and capital access services to these companies. Each year BioEnterprise chooses a select group of companies to join its client base. Being selective allows BioEnterprise to focus its strengths to help companies achieve greater levels of business success. Based in Cleveland, BioEnterprise’s founders and partners are The Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals Health System, Case Western Reserve University, and Summa Health System. The initiative comprises the collective activities of BioEnterprise and each of the institutions' commercialization offices: the Case Research Institute Office of Technology Transfer, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, and Summa Enterprise Group. Since its launch in July 2002, the BioEnterprise Initiative has created, recruited, and accelerated more than 40 companies that have attracted more than $150 million in new funding.