Siemens Healthineers, today announced the acquisition of Medicalis Corporation, a provider of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Solutions at the point of order entry, Imaging Workflow (IW) management, and Referral Management (RM). Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed.
For Siemens Healthineers—the separately managed healthcare business of Siemens AG— the acquisition will expand its Population Health Management (PHM) portfolio to enable healthcare providers to effectively bridge between PHM at the health system level and at the departmental level.
The newly-acquired Population Health Management portfolio will extend the Siemens Healthineers strategy for Value-Based Healthcare across the health system enterprise and hospital departmental levels:
– Clinical Decision Support provides the mechanism, as defined under the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (PAMA), to check appropriateness of imaging orders and enables healthcare providers to define and evolve their standard of care, according to their appropriate use criteria (AUC), based on evidence and best practice. Today, 20%–30% of high-tech imaging procedures fail to provide information that improves patient welfare and, therefore, may represent, at least in part, unnecessary imaging services.
– Imaging Workflow orchestrates the interpreting physician desktop, streamlining workflow, and standardization of diagnostic pathways for high-impact disease states. It ensures the right specialist, the right tools, a timely read, and prevention of care gaps.
– Referral Management helps to avoid breaks in care by providing simple appointment scheduling tools, which help a patient schedule examinations in their network. This avoids leakage of patient information to another health system, which breaks communication and causes lost revenue.
The solutions developed by Medicalis are expected to address the immediate need for consolidating providers to orchestrate and standardize their imaging workflow and to achieve compliance with the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014, expected to become effective on January 1, 2018, which mandates consultation of appropriateness CDS at the point of order for certain advanced imaging tests.
Siemens Healthineers believes these solutions will enable providers to achieve PAMA compliance while retaining control over the content, allowing them to move beyond simple compliance towards truly establishing an evolving standard of care based on evidence and direct health system experience.
“The acquisition of Medicalis will allow us to offer healthcare providers a powerful solution to define, implement, monitor, and evolve their own standard of care for their diagnostic service line,” says Robert Taylor, Head of Digital Services Population Health Management, Digital Health Services, Siemens Healthineers. “We are excited to support our customers with these innovative tools to remove the variability from key high-impact disease states, to create standardized diagnostic pathways which enhance outcomes, control costs, and when combined with intelligent referral management, improve the patient experience overall.”