cGate Health

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Summary

A perfect storm is brewing in the healthcare industry.

• Baby Boomers are starting to hit retirement age, creating more patient demand than ever, and the healthcare needs of our aging population will drive vast numbers of patient data into the healthcare industry.
• Baby Boomer retirees make up 40 percent of doctors and 43 percent of skilled nurses actively working in medicine today, and the upcoming retirement bonanza will see 78 million Americans leave the workforce in 2011 alone.
• According to the American Medical Association, 70% of a person’s medical record is comprised from laboratory test data. Upwards of 80 percent of the clinical decisions physicians make every day are based upon those same lab tests, yet, amazingly, a bi-directional data flow between medical professionals and labs had yet to be realized.

The large amounts of data combined with the decreasing size of the medical profession means that doctors and nurses will need true clinical mobility solutions that allow them to place orders, review results, and move workflow forward from anywhere, at any time and from any device with ease.

Our government has staged electronic medical records (EMRs) as an ingredient to soften the blow, and HIPAA requirements combined with the $20 billion HITECH Act are certainly helping healthcare go digital. Traditional EMRs (which have received the lion’s share of attention from this initiative) however don’t provide physicians access to the most actionable data - lab results. To date, EMR systems in hospitals and practices have simply turned the paper-based lab results into PDFs which have a ‘results only capability.”

cGate Health has filled the gap with powerful, electronic health lab solutions that enable physicians – and the nurses who support them – to order, manage, analyze and collaborate on vital patient labs over a secure, fast, web-based platform. cGate’s clinical mobility solutions empower doctors to make critical decisions about patient care swiftly, from the hospital, from the office, and from the road, without having to stop seeing their other patients.

Challenge

Mobility sounds great in theory, but increasing amounts of sophisticated cybercrime means that making data available everywhere is a dangerous business. HIPAA and HITECH Acts help establish guidelines for securely administering EMRs, coding web applications to facilitate EMRs, and hardening hosting environments to securely house EMRs. But, to succeed in keeping personal health information (PHI) private, healthcare providers and the companies that serve them will need to do more than the minimum requirement.

Outside of the need to secure PHI, cGate understood that the influx in patient data scheduled to start hitting this year meant that a hosting provider had to meet critical performance metrics. For patients to receive the care they should, the host’s network had to stay up-and-running despite being highly taxed repeatedly.

Rob Donnelly, CEO of cGate Health, reveals some of the specific challenges cGate faced in bringing his healthcare EMR solution to fruition. “We excel in achieving compliance with HIPAA and HITECH mandates in our business practices and web applications, but securely storing and transmitting patient data is not our core expertise. We chose a strategic relationship with a secure hosting partner to safely handle the volumes of data that we push through our web application. We turned to an outsourced partner to help ensure seamless operation of our service for healthcare providers. After all, our system impacts whether lives are saved or lost.”

Security of patient data in transit and at rest was a high priority. A security breach would be catastrophic for cGate and could irrevocably damage the company’s reputation and credibility within the healthcare industry. Finding an experienced HIPAA hosting partner that took a proactive position in helping its healthcare clients achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance was exhausting, but once cGate found FireHost they knew they’d made the right choice.

Solution

After working with several hosting companies that were unable to meet the HIPAA, security or network efficiency requirements, cGate found success with FireHost. According to Donnelly, “FireHost has risen like cream to the top of the healthcare hosting world.”

FireHost seamlessly moved all of Cgate’s existing patient data over to its secure environment without causing any downtime in the transition, and there has not been a single security breach.

“FireHost gave us the bi-directional data flow that is critical for clinical mobility and to our success,” said Donnelly. “Security and HIPAA compliance are requirements of any web host we would consider. FireHost certainly meets those criteria, but they also understand that healthcare data is mission critical. FireHost enables us to send and receive the massive quantities of data doctors and nurses need to make clinical decisions with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Because FireHost performs at the level that it does, doctors will be able to make clinical decisions from anywhere, at anytime and from any device – this saves lives!.”

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www.cgatehealth.com