CMTC announces Physician Collaboration Platform (“PCP”) Upgrade: A cloud-based telehealth solution for improved collaboration, access and performance
PARAMUS, NJ – Collaborative Medical Technology Corporation (“CMTC”) announces the release of their latest innovation–Physician Collaboration Platform 4.0 (“PCP”). The platform’s enhancements deliver a new level of medical connectivity, community and clinical information sharing.
PCP is designed to streamline remote consultations or second opinions, expedite patient transfers and facilitate continuity of care. “Critical and complex care situations require patients’ medical records and imagines to be shared and accessed by multiple specialists. Hospital systems are not well integrated within the same network, let alone across networks, states and even oceans,” said Simon Schurr, CEO and Chairman of CMTC. “That was our motivation to migrate the PCP to a cloud-based suite of apps – accessible by physicians, specialists, clinicians and insurance providers anywhere.”
“The Platform has a new permission-based networking capability that enables doctors to invite colleagues to view and comment on cases,” says Vasyl Zayachkivsky, PhD, Chief Information Officer and software development architect at CMTC. “Doctors can build and manage communities of medical and research collaborators. Additionally, the ‘one-click sign-on’ orchestrates all the interoperability and connectivity behind the scenes – so as more apps, medical monitoring devices, and functionality are added to the platform the physicians and healthcare providers simply log in as usual”, Dr. Zayachkivsky added.
PCP4.0 assembles a sharable, template-based composite patient record and is supported by telemedicine / telehealth / telepresence capabilities. The app includes a powerful utility to aggregate and organize disparate data sources (proprietary, legacy, paper-based) with a built-in diagnostic-quality (DICOM) viewer for radiology, MRI, and CT/CAT scans. The embedded picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) can be used separately or integrated with existing hospital PACS capabilities.
Additionally, PCP4.0 also complements an electronic health records system as well as health information exchanges (HIE) and represents a new class of “smart EHR” apps. It automates the process of “clinical information commerce” and provides intelligent operation and management of referral orders, authorizations, and clinical information sharing across borders and across organizations, including accountable care organizations (ACOs).
The system replaces inefficient and fragmented communications methods of phone, fax, email, CDs of images, and overnight deliveries with a turnkey, on-demand, cloud-based solution.
Enhanced Protocol Workflow
PCP4.0 now has the capacity to utilize complex, rules-based workflow templates. The workflow can be customized to each institution’s protocol or follow standards of evidence-based care. Now, specialty departments can establish consistent procedures for all clinicians for capturing patient and clinical data according to their best practices. Each protocol can be customized and updated to reflect advancements in diagnosis techniques and treatment algorithms.
PCP facilitates the continuity of care across all clinicians involved in a patient’s care, ensuring that no vital step or patient information is missed. Physicians can make additional requests for patient data via the communications tool, and the data can then be noted in the patient’s record within the app.
Powerful Community Builder
With the release of PCP4.0, physicians and their medical assistants can now invite colleagues and share patient records, according to different access rules. The system has predefined access rights, but can be customized based on specific requirements with a hospital, association or research team. For example, a hospital can set up access for all specialists within a particular specialty, or they might also allow cross-specialty collaboration. Alternatively, centers of medical excellence can link with physicians at community hospitals or remote-care facilities and define separate communities for each.
Among the first to use the new platform, Miles Varn, MD, chief medical officer of PinnacleCare, a global private health advisory company, said, “The innovative PCP4.0 enabled PinnacleCare to create an on-line platform to facilitate obtaining virtual second opinions from leading specialists at medical institutions such as UCLA, Emory, University of Miami, Hospital for Special Surgery and the Department of Neurosurgery at Weill Cornell. The PCP 4.0 platform has enabled us to provide more efficient and effective consultative services while supporting our global expansion initiatives.”
“The new PCP4.0 represents an exciting revolution in medical collaboration, communication and delivery of care. It enables the sharing of organized medical records and images for consultative diagnosis, review, or for pre-surgery consultation from any of our domestic and international centers directly to the specialist’s computer anyplace, anytime,” said Dr. Varn.
Driving Growth and Improving Healthcare Outcomes
The cloud-based hosting and true distributed architecture of the new release puts CMTC at the ready to scale their platform offering. Currently, interoperability between healthcare systems is hampered by disparate legacy technologies. The cloud-based distributed architecture is scalable to add capacity to meet any level of demand with uninterrupted service.
Dr. Kieran J. Murphy, M.D., and Professor of Radiology at University Health Network in Toronto, weighed in on the upgrade announcement. “Flexible systems like the Physician Collaboration Platform can strengthen referral network relationships, enable physicians to build stronger relationships with consumers, improve operational efficiencies, lower costs and improve healthcare quality by getting patients to the right specialists for faster diagnosis and appropriate care.”
Access from Anywhere with Improved Platform Performance
The new PCP4.0 is a robust and agile, cloud-based solutions suite delivered as Platform as a Service (PaaS). This technological upgrade and ease of access from any internet-enabled location supports patient care with reliable and secure tools for collaboration and communication. The platform consists of 5 key apps including vConsult, vSecondOpinion, vPhysican, vImaging and vHealthChart. Additional apps are in development and are scheduled for release in first quarter 2014.
Best-in-Class Architecture
The PCP was developed using Microsoft development tools and follows best practices set forth in Microsoft Connected Health Framework for service-oriented health information and collaboration architecture. The upgraded platform operates on a virtualized server architecture to enable rapid scaling of users and handle the increased volume of virtual consultation of medical cases and high-quality diagnostic images.
About Collaborative Medical Technology Corporation
CMTC specializes in developing diagnostic and treatment collaboration solutions using innovative cloud-based applications that provide telehealth/telemedicine capabilities. Their robust and agile solutions suite is delivered as platform as a service (PaaS). The Physician Collaboration Platform (PCP) aggregates and organizes disparate data sources to create and share a composite patient record that replaces inefficient and fragmented communications with a turnkey, on-demand, cloud-based solution. The CMTC tools enable a case manager to collaborate with multiple specialists by sharing a patient’s relevant medical records, diagnosis and treatment plans and radiology images in DICOM providing high-definition diagnostic quality. Interaction between the physicians is provided through a secure web portal to maximize accuracy, privacy and efficiency, yet delivering access on any Internet-ready device. The system enables hospitals and physicians to create, brand, and manage secure collaborative communities of clinicians/providers.
For more information, visit www.cmtcorp.com.
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