CareFusion Announces New Technologies To Advance Interoperability With Health Care Information Systems – #HIMSS12

Today, CareFusion announced the introduction of three new applications that will enable easier use of infusion pumps at hospital bedside. helps bridge the gap between medical devices, patient EMRs, and a hospital’s HIT system. Now hospitals have the information they need to drive workflow efficiencies and improve clinical practice.

New Alaris® infusion technologies to be featured at Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference, booth #2855

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — CareFusion today announced new Alaris® infusion technologies, connectivity services and analytics offerings to improve interoperability with health care information technology (HIT) systems and help health care providers increase efficiency and deliver better patient care.

The new solutions from CareFusion include three applications in its Alaris Connectivity Services portfolio, part of the CareFusion Coordination Engine, to enable clinicians to pre-populate infusion parameters, automate infusion documentation and better manage their fleet of infusion pumps. The company also announced new data, analytics and reporting capabilities to support clinical workflows through its Alaris Infusion Viewer for Pharmacy Logistics, Knowledge Portal for infusion technology and a mobile-ready version of its Knowledge Portal for ventilation therapy.

These new technologies join a broad offering of CareFusion solutions that benefit pharmacy, nursing, respiratory therapy, quality and information technology (IT) departments by:

  • Enabling a safer, more efficient workflow for medication management and administration;
  • Equipping health care providers with real-time and retrospective data and analytics to improve clinical practice and workflows; and,
  • Advancing interoperability between CareFusion’s medical systems and HIT providers to enable more accurate and timely documentation of clinical therapies into hospitals’ electronic medical records (EMRs).

“In today’s evolving health care landscape, interoperability between devices and information systems is among our customers’ most critical priorities,” said Tom Leonard, president of Medical Systems at CareFusion. “As a leader in critical care devices for acute care hospitals, CareFusion is uniquely able to equip customers with actionable information that helps bridge the gap between medical devices and a hospital’s HIT system. Armed with these insights, hospitals have the information they need to drive workflow efficiencies and improve clinical practice.”

The three new applications on the Alaris Connectivity Services platform, which enables hospitals to enhance infusion safety, workflow and quality through wireless interoperability between the company’s Alaris Connectivity Gateway, HIT systems and EMRs, include:

  • Infusion Parameter Pre-population, helping to improve patient safety and reduce medication administration errors by enabling pharmacists to remotely program IV medication orders on the Alaris® System. This application reduces the number of manual steps required to program an infusion order, helping to improve clinician workflow and reduce the risk of harmful and costly IV medication programming errors at the patient’s bedside.
  • Infusion Documentation, automating IV medication administration documentation from the Alaris System to the patient’s EMR, equipping health care providers with more timely and accurate infusion data to aid in clinical decision-making.
  • Asset Management, helping hospitals automate equipment inventory management by providing online visibility to the location, status and availability of each Alaris System within a facility. This application is integrated with a Wi-Fi-based Real-Time Location System from AeroScout, a global market leader in Enterprise Visibility solutions for health care and other industries.

Both the Infusion Parameter Pre-population and Asset Management applications are in limited market release and are anticipated to be commercially available in the coming months.

CareFusion also announced the Alaris Infusion Viewer for Pharmacy Logistics, a Web-based dashboard that displays Alaris infusion data from around the hospital or health system and provides near real-time* status of infusions administered through the Alaris System. Using the Alaris Infusion Viewer for Pharmacy Logistics, pharmacists can make timely, informed decisions to improve pharmacy workflow and medication management specific to infusion preparation and management.

In addition, the company recently expanded its CareFusion Knowledge Portal platform beyond its offering for Pyxis® dispensing technologies to include ventilation therapy and infusion technologies:

  • The Knowledge Portal for ventilation therapy is an analytics and reporting tool that measures clinical and process variability in ventilator therapy and provides clinicians and management actionable information to help improve patient care. The reporting capabilities, accessible from any Web-enabled device, focus on ventilator weaning and notifications on important patient trends to measure compliance with or variance from best practices.
  • The Knowledge Portal for infusion technologies is a Web-based analytics and reporting tool pharmacists and clinicians can use to access retrospective infusion device data. These insights can help health care providers develop safer medication practices, improve clinical practice and increase infusion workflow efficiency.

“These technologies are among more than 10 innovative new products CareFusion has announced in the past three months,” added Leonard. “At the same time, we continue to develop and strengthen our partnerships with HIT providers to further promote interoperability. These combined efforts reflect our ongoing commitment to bring to market solutions that help meet our customers’ evolving needs to increase safety, improve efficiency and lower operating costs.”

Other recently announced CareFusion technologies featured this week at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in booth #2855 include:

  • CareFusion Coordination Engine, a single, fault tolerant interface engine for CareFusion products connected to a hospital’s network. This solution enables both hospitals and health systems to significantly reduce the number of interface connections that a customer needs to create and maintain for multiple dispensing systems, infusion pumps and ventilators within their facilities, simplifying the ability to integrate with a hospital’s EMR.
  • Pyxis Enterprise System (ES) platform, the company’s next-generation automated dispensing platform that provides flexible, enterprise-ready solutions for centralized system management across a health system. Notable product releases on the platform are the Pyxis® Enterprise Server and Pyxis MedStation® ES system, which help streamline workflow processes across IT, pharmacy and nursing to enable safer medication management and increased cost control.
  • Interoperability between Pyxis medication and supply technologies and HIT systems, helping hospitals improve nursing and pharmacy productivity by minimizing redundant processes, documentation and disruptions and enabling caregivers to automatically capture and manage patient data to help improve patient care, workflow efficiency and financial performance.
  • CareFusion Ventilation System, which combines its industry-leading AVEA®, VELA® and EnVE™ ventilators with interoperability and analytics software to better address the clinical and operational challenges and costly variances in patient care. The software includes the CareFusion Respiratory Documentation Application, a handheld, positive patient ID application that automates the collection of ventilator documentation data at the point of care, and then wirelessly transmits it to a hospital’s EMR system to more accurately and efficiently document the patient’s therapy.

About CareFusion

CareFusion (NYSE: CFN) is a global corporation serving the health care industry with products and services that help hospitals measurably improve the safety and quality of care. The company develops market-leading technologies including Alaris® infusion pumps, Pyxis® automated dispensing and patient identification systems, AVEA®, AirLife™ and LTV® series ventilation and respiratory products, ChloraPrep® skin prep products, MedMined® services for data mining surveillance, Nicolet™ neurological monitoring and diagnostic products, V. Mueller® surgical instruments, and an extensive line of products that support interventional medicine. CareFusion employs more than 14,000 people across its global operations. More information may be found at www.carefusion.com.

   

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