It's not every year that the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual meeting hosts a new exhibitor debuting a new product that's the brainchild of a radiologist.
But that's the case with Zen Medical Technologies, a medical software developer with offices in Las Vegas, the venue for this week's HIMSS 2012 meeting.
Zen Medical's product is an economical cloud-based software system that allows relaying of critical test results and related messages to as many physicians and clinical staff as needed. The HIPAA-conformant notification system is intended to work in the smartphone world of texting and Internet messaging, although the software will also send telephone messages and faxes.
The company is in the process of soliciting customers for beta-testing, particularly acute care physicians and staff, but also radiologists.
The software customizes a user's preferences for receiving both urgent and critical-but-nonurgent messages. If the user doesn't respond to three levels of escalation, each delivered based on the user's preferences, a backup recipient designated by the user will be called. Multiple scenarios can be customized by each user based on day of week, time of day, type of notification, and other categories.
The software is configured to be single- or bidirectional, but in all cases it generates notification receipt records and customized reports that can be used to measure benchmarking.
Company founder Dr. Armen Hovanessian, a neuroradiologist, developed the application after deciding there must be a better way to communicate with the trauma care team of a patient he'd just diagnosed as having had an acute stroke. When a radiologist needs to contact personnel such as emergency department staff, neurosurgeons, interventional radiologists, or operating room staff, it helps to have a tool that can locate all of these individuals rapidly in the way that they wish to be contacted.
