Centricity Cardio Enterprise Unveiled at ACC 2012

22 March 2012

Centricity Cardio Enterprise Unveiled at ACC 2012

 

GE Healthcare’s New Cardiovascular IT Solution Enables Full Clinical Access, Enhanced Physician Productivity, and Improved Charge Capture Accuracy

CHICAGO -- March 22, 2012 – At the 61st Meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago next week, GE Healthcare is introducing Centricity* Cardio Enterprise, a new and comprehensive IT solution that offers cardiologists a single point of access to patient data, images and reports across the continuum of care while enhancing physician productivity and improving charge capture accuracy. Centricity Cardio Enterprise enables the cardiovascular care area with configurable workflow, tools, and reports that can be shared across multiple facilities and organizations.

Cardiologists can be more mobile than ever before using Centricity Cardio Enterprise. Whether a clinician is in the lab, on the floor, in the OR, in their office across town, or at home over the weekend - patient data and diagnostic-quality images are available at their fingertips when they need it. Centricity Cardio Enterprise allows cardiologists to easily and securely access the complete patient cardiovascular record for rapid and more informed clinical decision making - determinations that can often be life impacting for patients.

“The industry needs a web-enabled solution to truly move to the next generation of cardiovascular care,” said Nadim Daher, principal analyst – Medical Imaging and Imaging Informatics, Frost and Sullivan. “Today’s cardiologist doesn’t have time to ensure she’s in the same place every time she wants to diagnose a patient. The industry needs to evolve to meet the clinicians’ needs. Centricity Cardio Enterprise fits that need.”

CIOs and cardiology administrators will appreciate Centricity Cardio Enterprise’s scalability and IT infrastructure, leveraging GE Healthcare’s vendor neutral archiving platform. It provides standards-based image and document storage with an ability to intelligently enforce lifecycle management policies. Centricity Cardio Enterprise also automates post-procedural patient outcomes management to not only help customers in meeting today’s regulatory needs, but also prepare them for upcoming changes in the future.

“We value our partnership with GE and its focus on providing Clinical IT solutions that simplify access to critical patient information for our clinicians,” said Daniel Salzberg, Administrative Director – Information Services at Bon Secours Health System in Virginia. “We are excited about the possibilities of the new Cardiovascular IT platform, Centricity Cardio Enterprise, which provides a comprehensive solution across the cardiovascular care area.”

“This is the future of cardiovascular patient care,” said Michael Jackman, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT. “We’re delivering greater value to cardiologists with Centricity Cardio Enterprise—particularly with its location agnostic access and productivity enhancement capabilities. Less time entering data or manually reporting on a cardiovascular IT solution means more time spent on patient care.”

*Centricity is a registered trademark of General Electric Company.

Self-Insurance Complicates Deal on Birth Control

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Thursday, February 16, 2012

Self-Insurance Complicates Deal on Birth Control 

By KATIE THOMAS

The Obama administration thought it had found a way to ease mounting objections to a requirement in the new health care act that all employers — including religiously affiliated hospitals and universities — offer coverage for birth control to women free of charge.

It would make the insurers cover the costs, rather than the organizations themselves.

But the administration announced the compromise plan before it had figured out how to address one conspicuous point: Like most large employers, many religiously affiliated organizations choose to insure themselves rather than hire an outside company to assume the risk.

Now, the organizations are trying to determine how to reconcile their objections to offering birth control on religious grounds with their role as insurers — or whether there can be any reconciliation at all. And the administration still cannot put the thorny issue to rest.

“We’re all kind of waiting and seeing,” said Jim Liske, chief executive of the Prison Fellowship, a Christian charity that insures itself and objects to offering the morning-after pill to its employees.

The administration has remained mostly silent on how self-insured institutions will be treated, other than to say that the details will be worked out in meetings with religious leaders in the days and weeks to come.

“This policy will be developed collaboratively so that the ultimate outcome works for religious employers, their workers and the public,” an administration official said Wednesday.

But some expressed skepticism that any satisfactory solution could be reached. “That’s quite a trick,” said Richard M. Doerflinger, associate director of “pro-life activities” at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been among the most vocal critics of the birth control mandate.

“Putting the obligation on the insurer and not the employer doesn’t help much if they are the same person,” he said.

FTC Terminates Employment Scam

News release from the FTC:

For Release: 01/31/2012

FTC Action Terminates Nationwide Employment Scam

Agency Cautions Consumers: Be Wary of Job Offers that Charge Fees

An operation that allegedly deceived consumers with bogus promises of nonexistent sales jobs will be banned from marketing any employment products or services under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.
The proposed settlement order against National Sales Group and other defendants resolves FTC charges filed as part of a crackdown on scammers who falsely promise employment opportunities to financially distressed consumers. According to the FTC's complaint, the defendants advertised on CareerBuilder.com and other online job boards, and their telemarketers falsely told consumers they recruited for Fortune 1000 employers and had a unique ability to get them interviewed and hired.

The FTC complaint alleged that the defendants charged fees, purportedly for background checks and other services, and often overcharged, taking $97 from consumers who had agreed to pay $29 or $38. The defendants also allegedly charged some consumers recurring fees of $13.71 or more per month without their consent. At the FTC's request, in February 2011, the court halted the allegedly illegal practices and froze the defendants' assets pending litigation.

Under the proposed settlement order, Anthony J. Newton, National Sales Group, and I Life Marketing LLC, also doing business as Executive Sales Network and Certified Sales Jobs, are banned from selling employment products or services. They and co-defendant Jeremy S. Cooley are permanently prohibited from misrepresenting material facts about any product or service, and from violating the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule, including misrepresenting the benefits of a good or service or misrepresenting that any person is affiliated with or endorsed by another person or government entity. The defendants also are barred from violating the Rule by billing consumers without their consent and failing, during calls, to clearly and promptly disclose the seller's identity, the call's purpose, and the nature of the goods or services.

The order also bars the defendants from selling or using customers' personal information, failing to properly dispose of customer information, and attempting to collect payments from past customers. In addition, the order imposes a $13 million judgment that will be suspended once Newton has paid $279,000, terminated a lease on a 2009 Mercedes-Benz, and surrendered his interest in a residence in Huntington Beach, California. The full judgment will be imposed immediately if the defendants are found to have misrepresented their financial condition.

The Commission vote approving the proposed consent order was 4-0. It is subject to court approval. The FTC filed the proposed consent order in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

For more information, read Job Hunting-Job Scams.