2008-05-06
InferMed to help improve medical care in New Zealand
InferMed Limited, the leading global provider of advanced decision support and data-capture solutions for clinical research and practice, today announced a partnership with New Zealand’s BPAC Inc (Best Practice Advocacy Centre) focused on improving patient care. The partnership will integrate InferMed’s Arezzo®, a highly advanced clinical decision support software programme, with patient records from New Zealand’s four thousand GP’s, with the most up to date clinical guidance to support clinicians at the point of care and reduce the possibility of errors.
This collaboration builds on an earlier project which saw BPAC and InferMed combine content from over one hundred clinical guidelines, with the Arezzo system. Arezzo is a workflow and inference rules engine used for the design, creation and execution of clinical guidelines, order sets and patient care protocols. Arezzo customises guidelines, protocols, and care pathways so that only relevant patient data and recommendations with pros and cons personalised to each patient are returned to the clinician.
BPAC Inc’s Executive Director, Prof Murray Tilyard, commented that “Arezzo has enabled BPAC to take existing paper-based guidelines and make them available as ‘active’ guidelines in general practices throughout New Zealand. GPs and other healthcare professionals can access chronic disease management, referral, and best practice guidelines via electronic medical records. It has made an enormous difference to their decision making and prescribing proficiencies”.
Arezzo moves beyond traditional passive medical content to provide active decision support as part of normal workflow, monitoring clinical situations and providing recommendations from relevant clinical pathways. It supplies patient-specific recommendations, with pros and cons while the patient is being seen. Customised patient information leaflets can be made available dynamically. Additionally, Arezzo can be made to request documentation of the reasons for not following recommendations, making full clinical audit facilities available.
NZ has five different GP Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems throughout the country. The Arezzo based application integrates with these EMR systems so that when any GP accesses the guidelines, the content is presented to them as per their own system. This seamless presentation avoids duplication of data-entry whilst coupling the recommendations with charting, prescribing, referral and order entry capabilities. Any additional information for which a GP is prompted, for example regarding diagnosis and treatment, or indeed variance information, is returned back into the EMR system from Arezzo. To date, this system has been accessed in excess of twenty thousand times by GP’s across the country.
Duane Lawrence, CEO of InferMed Limited said that “Our success together with BPAC is further proof of the power of strong corporate partnerships. The combined resources of our two organisations have proven what a real and measurable difference Arezzo based solutions can make in patient care. We are exceptionally proud of our partnership with BPAC and pleased to be the providers of a technology that will aide GP’s and other healthcare providers nationally throughout NZ in improving patient outcomes.”
About BPAC
BPAC is an independent organization with charitable status that promotes healthcare interventions which meet patient’s needs and are evidence based, cost effective and suitable for the New Zealand context.
Media Contact:
Marie Tysall-Blay
E-mail: marie.tysall-blay@infermed.com
Mob: +44 7765888100
