Platinum Award:

-- Alegent Health (www.alegent.com), based in Omaha, Neb., received the Platinum Award for Best Newsroom.

Gold Awards:

-- Alegent Health received the Gold Awards for Best Health/Healthcare Content and Best Intranet Site.

-- Texas Health Resources (www.texashealth.org) won the Gold Award for Best Newsroom

Silver Award

-- Henry Ford Health System (www.henryfordhealth.org) garnered the Silver Award for Best Overall Internet Site

Award of Distinction

-- Virginia Mason Medical Center (www.virginiamason.org) won the Award of Distinction for Best Quality Communication.

Finalist

-- Henry Ford Health System was a finalist for the eHealth Organizational Commitment award.

"This national recognition of our clients' success in using the Internet to improve the online consumer experience is a validation of their tenacious efforts and of our leading-edge solutions. It acknowledges the key strategic role our solutions play in enabling innovative health care organizations to communicate more effectively with stakeholders by enhancing the quality, convenience and efficiency of their online communications," said Peter Kuhn, president of MEDSEEK.

About eHealthcare Leadership Awards

The eHealthcare Leadership Awards highlight the Internet's role in achieving an organization's business objectives and recognize the hard work involved in creating outstanding health websites. Over 1,100 entries were submitted and 114 individuals familiar with healthcare and the Internet judged the entries. For more information, visit www.strategichealthcare.com.

ABOUT MEDSEEK

Birmingham, Ala.-based MEDSEEK provides healthcare organizations with enterprise eHealth solutions to fully engage and strengthen relationships with key constituents -- physicians, patients, employees, and consumers. By connecting information and communities to foster an enhanced experience with the organization, hospitals will improve community advocacy, revenue and patient throughput, and clinical decision making. MEDSEEK's comprehensive technology platform and strategic consulting services create the infrastructure and provide the thought leadership for hospitals to deliver the most powerful portal solutions. With more than ten years' experience and 600+ hospital customers, MEDSEEK has the experience and expertise to meet the diverse needs of the healthcare community. MEDSEEK also maintains offices in California and Mississippi. For more information, visit www.medseek.com or call 888-MEDSEEK.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE: MEDSEEK

Amendola Communications for MEDSEEK 
Jodi Amendola, 480-664-8412 
jamendola@ACmarketingPR.com

Standardized medical terminology has been identified as a critical element to ensuring advanced interoperability among healthcare IT applications. This contributes to improved patient safety, superior clinician decision-making capabilities and rapid reimbursement.

Commenting on the agreement, Richard Craven, director at Clinical Solutions, says, "HLI is a pioneer in healthcare information and communications technology (ICT) and terminology. This partnership will assistClinical Solutions in providing innovative, progressive solutions for its customers around the world. The role of standardized coding is critical to the ability for healthcare IT applications across the globe to work together, ensuring that risk is minimized and patient safety improved.

Craven added, "This will be a critical feature in our upcoming release of applications for the urgent care market, in line with Lord Darzi's Next Stage Review to bring care closer to the patient. Lord Darzi's Review will see more services made available at the right times and right places convenient to the patients. These centers will bring together a number of different services and therefore different clinical systems, all interacting more efficiently thanks to the HLI technology."

The HLI Language Engine provides a tool for healthcare organizations, IT vendors and government agencies to effectively localize, update and disseminate over 80 controlled, licensed healthcare terminologies, mappings and other healthcare terminology-related content issued by a growing number of standards bodies including ICD-9, ICD-10, LOINC(R) and SNOMED-CT(R).

According to Marc Horowitz, HLI's senior vice president, "We are proud to deploy HLI's Language Engine within Clinical Solutions' comprehensive solutions suite that is recognized throughout the world for its ability to enhance patient care while efficiently managing resources. This partnership ensures that Clinical Solutions will provide clinicians with automatic, real-time updates and mappings from all major standards bodies and terminologies, as well as free text interpretation to ensure true interoperability, accuracy and standardization between hospitals, regions and countries."

About Clinical Solutions

Clinical Solutions is a leading supplier of flexible evidence-based decision support and clinical software solutions to the healthcare industry that help healthcare professionals and citizens safely and consistently assess a patient's symptoms and direct them to the most appropriate level of care. This results in more efficient management of resources and alleviates pressure on emergency and primary healthcare services. This means lower costs, lower risks and a higher degree of patient satisfaction.

Clinical Solutions is a market-focused organisation that works with its customers, to establish a close working partnership through the sharing of ideas, knowledge and expertise. Its scaleable solutions have been proven to guide clinicians to deliver best practice in providing leading healthcare advice.

The company also provides knowledge management andcase management solutions, used for long-term conditions management, web-based health assistants including bio-surveillance solutionsused in pandemicand biological threat situations, and out-of-hours solutions for urgent care to both public and private healthcare providers. With each implementation, Clinical Solutions provides project management, IT consultancy and customisation, training and 24/7 support. Clinical Solutions has offices in UK, USA and Australia. Its customers include; NHS Direct in England and Wales; NHS 24 in Scotland; and many walk-in centres across England, as well as customers inNorth America, Portugal, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. Its solutions are used to serve over 100 million people across the world. With a mission to change the way the world accesses health and social care service, Clinical Solutions continues to invest in developing software solutions for health and social care organisations around the world. For further information visit: www.csdss.com.

About Health Language Inc.

Denver-based Health Language, Inc.(R) (HLI) develops and delivers state-of-the-art software solutions that automatically incorporate medical vocabulary and coding standards into healthcare information technology (HCIT) applications. HLI's Language Engine(R) (LE(R)) allows centralized access to medical terminology standards and generates mappings to create a common pool of standardized codes and concepts that enhance patient safety, facilitate clinical outcomes analysis and accelerate reimbursement. It also provides standards for modeling, storing, updating and distributing information consistently for interoperability between hospitals, regions and countries. For more information, visit www.healthlanguage.com or call 303.307.4400.

SOURCE: Health Language Inc.

Media contact for Health Language: 
Jan Shulman/Jodi Amendola 
Amendola Communications 
www.ACmarketingPR.com 
480-664-8412 x12 c 602-206-4284 
jshulman@ACmarketingPR.com 
or 
Media contact for Clinical Solutions: 
Helen Stevens/Bethan Wadeson 
www.berkeleypr.co.uk 
T. 01454 629 741 
Helen.stevens@berkeleypr.co.uk

Initially, five provider organizations located in a six-county coastal area that was battered by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 will share data over the MSCHIE. Authorized clinicians will be able to access aggregated patient clinical information integrated from disparate systems, from any location, 24x7, via Medicity's MediTrust interoperability platform and ProAccess clinical applications suite.

Dr. McIIwain, who in March 2007 was named co-chair of the Mississippi Health Information Infrastructure Technology Task Force by Governor Haley Barbour added, "To implement MSCHIE, IQH will collaborate closely with the state-appointed task force. The state has been keenly interested in using information technologies to facilitate clinical data exchange and ensure a community-based continuity of care record ever since Katrina damaged the healthcare infrastructure along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The absence of detailed patient histories and medical records put the citizens of Mississippi at risk and created an information vacuum for physicians and nurses as they sought to provide high-quality healthcare in a variety of care settings across the state."

Medicity's MediTrust and ProAccess solutions, installed in a hosted, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model will provide the MSCHIE with a secure interoperability platform, enabling clinicians to access community-based patient health records, clinical messaging and e-consultation, medical claims, medication history and more. The Medicity interoperability platform, community master patient index and EMR gateway facilitate the exchange of clinical data to and from EMRs, hospital information systems and ancillary systems such as lab, radiology, pathology, transcription, etc.

"Medicity's technology was developed to support our nation's healthcare goals of interconnecting clinicians and healthcare organizations, encouraging physician adoption of EMRs, personalizing care through online personal health records, and improving public health through tracking and analysis of regional and national patient data trends," said Kipp Lassetter, M.D., CEO of Medicity. "By sharing secure data on a daily basis, MSCHIE participants will enhance the overall continuity of care, reduce costs and ensure vital, up-to-date information are available to clinicians at the point-of-care."

MSCHIE will initially deploy Medicity solutions in a centralized model to maximize sharing of clinical information across participants, but expects to expand to include Medicity's Record Locating Service (RLS) to support those stakeholders across the state that would like to participate under a confederated or hybrid architecture model. MSCHIE's approach also leverages Medicity's security management, patient matching, clinical data indexing, retrieval and display. By integrating patient data from many disparate data sources, MSCHIE participants can improve healthcare outcomes by eliminating unnecessary tests and procedures, enabling more efficient clinical workflow for physicians and nurses and improve patient safety by reducing medical errors.

About Information & Quality Healthcare

Information & Quality Healthcare (IQH) is the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for Mississippi. By serving as a resource to the state's healthcare providers and to the Medicare beneficiaries, IQH seeks to fulfill its vision to be a leader in promoting a quality and cost-effective healthcare system. For more information please visit www.iqh.org.

About Medicity

With a single point of access to multiple data sources within and across healthcare enterprises, Medicity, Inc. empowers patients, providers and health plans with essential healthcare information, resulting in improved clinical workflow, enhanced patient safety and reduced costs. Medicity, Inc. serves more than 1,800 healthcare organizations globally and has been connecting healthcare since 1998. For more information please visit www.medicity.com.

SOURCE: Medicity, Inc.

Amendola Communications for Medicity 
Jodi Amendola, 480-664-8412 ext. 11 
jamendola@ACmarketingPR.com

The corrected release reads:

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY LAUNCHES CLINICAL OUTCOMES-BASED EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE TO REINFORCE RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS (RA) STANDARDS OF CARE

Program to Address Physician Gaps in Managing Rheumatic Conditions and Improve Patient Care and Outcomes

The University of Kentucky Pharmacy and Medicine Continuing Education Office (UKPMCE) announced today the launch of the Rheumatoid Arthritis Educational Challenge (RAEC), which will address deficits in the treatment of rheumatic diseases, particularly rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The multi-interventional, integrated series of educational activities are designed to help rheumatologists and related physicians that treat RA apply the latest evidence-based standards of care to maximize outcomes for patients with RA.

"The RAEC takes a unique perspective on influencing appropriate practice behavior of physicians to overcome barriers that prevent them from managing RA effectively," said Philip J. Mease, M.D., Chief of Rheumatology Research at Swedish Medical Center and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. "The initiative will assess specific provider and patient measures that must be addressed for improvements in outcomes to occur. The goal is to combine early diagnosis and treatment practices with accurate assessment of disease status and treatment response through various clinical measures, imaging techniques and biomarkers to advance clinical outcomes and chance of remission."

The impact of RA on the national economy continues to grow. Cost drivers include delayed diagnosis and treatment of RA with TNFI antagonists, which have been shown to reduce disease activity and slow or stop joint destruction. Additionally, patients diagnosed with early RA often are not treated within an appropriate time, resulting in early structural joint damage and loss of function. Compounding the problem is that physicians face a wide array of options, complicating the determination of the ideal therapeutic strategy for their patients.

To enable physicians to meet these challenges, UKPMCE is overseeing the RAEC program to help them:

-- Understand the benefits of an aggressive treatment-to-target strategy in the early management of RA

-- Apply appropriate, integrated referral and care pathways for multidiscipline management of patients with RA and comorbid conditions, including atypical cases

-- Utilize the risk / benefit profiles and appropriate administration of biological / TNFI antagonist therapies in the management of RA patients

-- Learn appropriate patient-physician communication skills for discussing the rationale, benefits and risks of biological / TNFI antagonist therapies in RA

Added Mease, "The challenge is to enable rheumatologists to move beyond knowing and understanding standards of care and treatment guidelines into implementing and practicing those standards. The educational interventions of this initiative are designed to do just that--to assist practitioners in self-assessing and to empower them to close their own assessed practice gaps. In addition, the program will strengthen rheumatologists' patient-physician communication, disease and treatment assessment, as well as clinical decision-making skills in a manner that enhances patient care and outcomes."

Participants in the RAEC activity may qualify for CME credits through the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. The program is supported by an educational grant from Amgen, Inc. and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. For more information or to register, visit http://www.cecentral.com/raec or call (908) 253-9001.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PHARMACY AND MEDICINE CONTINUING EDUCATION OFFICE

In accordance with the University of Kentucky's education, research and service missions, the Pharmacy and Medicine Continuing Education program delivers quality educational activities responsive to advances in medicine, pharmacotherapy and patient care with an emphasis on improving patient and population health in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The program offers pharmacists, physicians and other healthcare professionals worldwide an opportunity to maintain and enhance their professional competencies in medicine and medication use through interactive, live activities and enduring materials. For more information, please visit http://www.ukyce.com/.

ABOUT RAEC

Rheumatoid Arthritis Educational Challenge (RAEC) is a multi-interventional, integrated series of CME-accredited educational activities developed to help physicians overcome barriers related to their rheumatoid arthritis patients' outcomes.

The core curriculum will focus on improving the knowledge and behavior of healthcare providers in the area of rheumatoid arthritis. The educational program will be presented to participants in various modules, containing interventions ranging from a live meeting workshop series to mobile learning activities and video satellite broadcasts. For more information or to register, visit http://www.cecentral.com/raec or call (908) 253-9001.

SOURCE: Gullapalli & Associates

Amendola Communications for Gullapalli & Associates 
Kate Donlon, 619-876-2654 
kdonlon@ACmarketingPR.com 
or 
Jan Shulman, 480-664-8412, x12 
jshulman@ACmarketingPR.com