A Medical Device Daily

Dialog Medical (Atlanta), a provider of informed consent and patient education systems for hospitals and physician practices, reported a new contract for its iMedConsent application with the Hospital of Saint Raphael, a 511-bed academic medical center affiliated with Yale University School of Medicine (both New Haven, Connecticut).

According to Dialog Medical, iMedConsent includes procedure-specific consent forms for more than 2,100 medical and surgical procedures; patient education documents for thousands of diagnoses and treatments; and an extensive anatomical image gallery that allows the physician to annotate images and simplify complex topics for the patient. In addition, the application automates the completion of patient documentation ranging from HIPAA disclosures to advance directives, including the digital capture of signatures, paperless storage of signed documents, and electronic notation in the patient's medical record.

"The Hospital of Saint Raphael decided to automate the informed consent process because we were seeking to better provide our patients with a consistent and complete message about their conditions and available treatments," said Janeanne Lubin-Szafranski, VP, general counsel and corporate compliance officer for The Hospital of Saint Raphael. "We also reviewed the revised CMS interpretive guidelines on informed consent and realized that automating the process would be the most effective way to ensure compliance with those guidelines."

"As an organization, The Hospital of Saint Raphael views standardization in any healthcare process as key to ensuring patient safety," said James Judson, RN, director of quality improvement for The Hospital of Saint Raphael. "Upon review of several options, Dialog Medical's iMedConsent application was found to meet our goal to standardize informed consent."

Dialog Medical said that more than 15,000 physicians in over 175 hospitals and physician practices nationwide use its iMedConsent application.