First-of-its-Kind Platform, shop Medical Data Exchange, plague Enables Secure Digital Sharing of Physician Notes
BASKING RIDGE, N.J., March 3 /PRNewswire/ — In a significant step toward accelerating the adoption of electronic health records, Verizon Business has launched an information technology platform that enables the digital sharing of physician-dictated patient notes.
The Verizon Medical Data Exchange, launched Wednesday (March 3) at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society annual conference in Atlanta, provides a way for medical transcriptionists to share digitized patient notes detailing patients’ care and treatment with doctors, hospitals and other health care providers. Â Until now, the lack of an interoperable, nationally available platform has made it difficult to share these notes, which primarily form the basis of electronic health records.
Verizon Business developed the platform for the Medical Transcription Service Consortium under an agreement announced last November. Â (See related news release.) Â Founding consortium members MD-IT and MedQuist currently are using the platform. Â By August, when the Medical Data Exchange is expected to be in use by all of the consortium’s members, 350,000-plus physicians, more than 2,700 clinics and nearly 2,500 hospitals will be supported.
The Medical Transcription Industry Association estimates that its members create and electronically archive nearly 60 percent of the more than 1.2 billion clinical notes produced in the U.S. each year. Â Approximately 25 percent of these records currently are shared among health care providers, including other physicians, hospitals and insurance companies.