TheNational Quality Forum(NQF; Washington) reported the endorsement of an initial set of measures to update its standards for the care of adults with diabetes. These voluntary standards represent the consensus of more than 260 healthcare providers, consumer groups, professional associations, purchasers, federal agencies and research and quality improvement organizations.

They are derived from a larger set of measures approved by the National Diabetes Quality Improvement Alliance and developed and maintained by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

The purpose of these NQF-endorsed measures is to improve the care of persons who have diabetes. The standards are designed to drive quality improvement primarily through external accountability at the health plan and provider level for ambulatory care, including public reporting of results.

NQF members will consider 32 additional diabetes performance measures intended for internal provider, health plan, and community quality improvement activities in a vote to take place later this month.

SolCom forms EHR consulting unit

SolCom (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) reported offering a new service to out-task document imaging at healthcare organizations, named SolComSource. SolCom said the service would target hospitals wanting to take a step toward an electronic health record (EHR), but lacking the resources to invest in a full-blown EHR.

SolComSource digitizes healthcare organizations currently storing their documents with microfiche or microfilm or simply saving them to an un-indexed CD.

Marv Addink, president and CEO, said that SolComSource gives organizations the power of digitized records without an investment in new training or equipment. “Along with removing the initial costs of training and equipment, once the documents are digitized, hospitals eliminate the need for storage space and can gain additional cost savings from workflow enhancements,” said Addink. He added that SolComSource also enables those using a saving-to-CD methodology “to store documents in an indexed fashion rather than a lump of almost unusable files.”

iCAD adds Mamassist as reseller

iCAD (Nashua, New Hampshire), a developer of computer-aided detection (CAD) solutions for the early identification of cancer, said it has added Mamassist (Statesville, North Carolina) to its reseller channel, their agreement enabling Mamassist to resell its ClickCAD solution to make CAD technology available to lower-volume facilities.

“We work with many practices that are committed to catching each and every blemish in their patients’ mammography readings but don’t have the financial resources to invest in CAD technology,” said Ken Hoglund, president of Mamassist. “By partnering with iCAD, we are now able to give smaller organizations a more cost-effective way to access the CAD technology being used at the world’s leading hospitals.”