OREANDA-NEWS. Ricoh Americas Corporation today announced a strategic partnership with InterSystems to develop new information solutions for acute healthcare that can improve workflow, cost-efficiency and ultimately patient care. Both companies will be exhibiting at the upcoming HIMSS 2014 Annual Conference and Exhibition, Feb. 23-27 in Orlando.

InterSystems, a global leader in software for connected care, provides InterSystems HealthShare(r), a health informatics platform, which enables strategic interoperability and analytics for action across a hospital network, community, region or nation. The Ricoh partnership with InterSystems will enable interoperable solutions designed to better manage healthcare information.

One solution, which will be demoed at HIMSS next week, will enable clinicians for the first time to photograph a newly admitted patient's injury and automatically insert the photo into the patient's electronic health record (EHR) without ever leaving the patient's bedside. Before taking the picture, the clinician would use the Ricoh Healthcare Camera to scan a barcode on the patient's wristband and add information to describe the injury. The tags could include user- defined items, such as "laceration" and "left leg," data the clinician enters directly, and even voice recordings. The photo image and data would then wirelessly attach to the patient's EHR. This solution would quickly and easily create more complete pictures of patients' progress, supporting improved outcomes.

"Information gaps are a big problem in healthcare," said Patrick Braun, Vice President, Healthcare Vertical, Ricoh Americas Corporation. "The ability to dynamically capture unstructured content objects at the point of care, index them, and intelligently structure this information for secure sharing among caregivers truly advances information mobility across the patient care continuum. For many healthcare organizations, unstructured information remains the anti-matter to interoperability and workflow process automation. Through our strategic partnership with InterSystems, we are eliminating silos of disparate data, streamlining workflows and providing innovative solutions making information work for our healthcare customers globally."

In the photography scenario, InterSystems HealthShare seamlessly integrates the camera, an EHR, and Ricoh technology, employing healthcare industry standards including, but not limited to, Health Level Seven International (HL7), Xtensible Markup Language (XML) and several Integrating Health Enterprise (IHE) profile standards for healthcare information exchange across disparate devices, systems and organizations. HealthShare is IHE-certified for interoperability.