• CareMedic Systems (St. Petersburg, Florida), a provider of proactive financial management solutions for hospitals and healthcare providers, said it has launched the Patient Access Management solution to "help healthcare organizations realize the positive benefits of a front-end-focused revenue cycle operation." The solution extends existing CareMedic solutions with new Registration Guidance processes, ensuring that all information — demographics, medical necessity, insurance, co-pays, deductibles, and payments — is captured and verified during the patient intake process with precise accuracy, producing greater clean claim rates, resulting in fewer denials or payment delays. It also incorporates a new financial clearance software solution developed by the Cleveland Clinic to further address the challenges associated with self pay, charity care, and consumer healthcare impact.

• iTech Medical (Huntington Beach, California) reported that it will be expanding its pilot clinical study of its proprietary information technology platform, Muscle Pattern Recognition (MPR), to Southern California. The two sites that have been selected to participate in the trial are the Rehabilitation Associates Medical Group, located on the campus of Long Beach Memorial Hospital, under the direction of Dr. Richard Adams, and the Advanced Clinical Research Institute in Anaheim, under the direction of Dr. Dennis Riff. MPR is a clinical tool that analyzes patterns of muscle recruitment. It provides detailed physiological information on muscle function that can assist in the diagnosis and treatment of back and neck injuries and illness. The company said that it has completed testing on more than 250 study subjects for the clinical trial in Salt Lake City since the trial was first announced in February, and that patient recruitment continues to be strong and is ongoing. The goal is to accumulate sufficient data to initiate a pivotal, independent clinical trial before the end of 2009.

• MedApps (Scottsdale, Arizona) has been granted FDA clearance for its expanded, flexible telehealth solution. The MedApps system features the HealthPAL, a small portable personal health device, to collect and transmit readings from glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, weight scales and pulse oximeters. Timely health readings from these devices are useful in maintaining wellness regimens and can assist clinicians in their treatment of patients with chronic diseases. The collected data is automatically transmitted to a secure central server where it can be accessed by healthcare professionals or stored to an online electronic personal health record such as Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health.

• Merge Healthcare (Milwaukee) reported the release of MergeCOM-3 version 4.0, which uses the latest updates to the DICOM standard, as well as new interfacing capabilities using the HL7 standard. Version 4.0 contains support for the latest DICOM standard Supplements, including high definition video, mammography and color MRI. This new release exemplifies Merge's commitment to consistently maintain the latest DICOM standards in its MergeCOM-3 toolkits. The HL7 Toolkit includes the HL7 v2.5.1 library along with extensive mapping capabilities, sample applications and documentation. All toolkits are available on C#/.NET and Java programming platforms, with support for all Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems.

• US Oncology (Houston) reported the launch of iKnowMed to the open market. iKnowMed is an oncology-specific electronic health record (EHR) system designed by oncologists for oncologists. The company said iKnowMed "leverages technology that helps physicians focus on clinical excellence and cost-effectiveness in community cancer care." It facilitates access to new solutions such as US Oncology's Innovent Oncology program, which provides Level I evidence-based medicine pathways to help oncologists realize the benefits of pay-for-performance. Other features of iKnowMed include oncology-specific terminology, decision support, outcomes reporting, imaging reports, comprehensive patient history, comprehensive cancer regimen library, dictation and transcription, lab results, detailed cancer diagnosis and staging content, and practice efficiencies.