Ten local companies were named as Greater Richmond’s Companies to Watch by The Venture Forum, a group that promotes the local entrepreneurial community.

The event, held Thursday night, highlights early stage businesses that have the potential to become significant contributors to the local economy, organizers said.

More than two dozen past Greater Richmond’s Companies to Watch award recipients have raised venture capital or had successful sales of their businesses after being selected for the award.

Those selected must have an innovative product, service or business model different from similar businesses in the same industry.

The honored were:

• Proxios, a Richmond-based company that provides information technology services to small companies and is a pioneer in “cloud” computing services.

• EbidLocal.com, which provides a marketplace to sellers operating local auctions, estate sales and local sales events.

• Marz Industries Inc., an Ashland-based company developing hydrogen fuel-cell technology designed to improve the fuel efficiency of diesel engines.

• eMommie.com, a Henrico County company that sells used or overstock maternity clothes on the Internet.

• MedCPU, a Henrico-based company that offers a transformational clinical decision support platform that delivers real-time guidance to clinicians when deviations from best practices and compliance occur.

• Handcraft Linen Services, a Richmond-based company that changed from being solely a dry cleaner to mostly handling the medical industry’s laundry, from bedding to gowns and towels.

• Urban Grid, a Richmond-based renewable energy company that specializes in the design and installation of solar panels, solar thermal systems, electric vehicle charging stations and wind energy systems.

• Unboxed Technology, a Richmond-based company that creates interactive software tools that help companies train employees, teach customers and increase productivity.

• The Pediatric Connection, a Richmond-based independent pediatric home health-care and durable medical equipment provider that specializes in caring for children with complex medical needs.

• Mobelux, a Richmond-based firm that designed original mobile applications for Tumblr, one of the most popular blogging platforms, and it develops other smartphone applications.

A crowd of about 200 attended the Greater Richmond Companies to Watch, an annual event put on by the Venture Forum to recognize promising local companies that have the potential to rapidly expand.

This year’s event, held at the Boathouse at Rocketts Landing, honored the following companies:

Proxios, a cloud computing company

Ebidlocal.com, an online marketplace for auctions and estate sales.

Marz Industries, which produces hydrogen fuel cell products for the transportation industry.

Emommie.com, an online maternity clothing website.

MedCPU, creates electronic medical record solutions for doctors.

Handcraft Linen Services, a local company that provides linen and uniform services to the healthcare industry.

Urban Grid, a local firm that sells solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations.

Unboxed Technology, which creates interactive systems to help companies train their employees and educate customers.

The Pediatric Connection, a home healthcare company that caters to children with complex medical issues.

Mobelux, a mobile app creator.

The key note speaker at the event was Christopher Fey, CEO of U.S. Preventive Medicine.

The adoption of technology, more specifically EMRs and clinical decision support systems, is critical for reducing healthcare costs, improving quality and supporting clinicians in their increasingly complex roles. It’s naive to think, however, that we will achieve these outcomes by adding more technology and more tasks to the clinician’s work flow. Technology adoption cannot happen at the expense of providing top-notch clinical care. After all, one of the tenets of medicine is “first do no harm.”

Clinicians do need support when and where it matters most — the exam room. Clinicians need simple, clinically smart solutions that capture the complete clinical picture in real time without changing or adding to the work flow. Every added piece of technology needs to work in harmony to enhance patient care and improve outcomes.

Two related issues driving physician pushback of EMR adoption include usability concerns and work flow disruption. Time spent looking at a computer is time not spent engaging a patient face to face. The Journal of General Internal Medicine article “Primary care physicians’ use of an electronic medical record system: a cognitive task analysis” reported that using EMRs increases physicians’ average screen gaze time by more than 100%, rising from 25% to 55% of consultation time, inevitably resulting in less eye contact and less meaningful conversation with the patient.

Clinicians have long-established work flows that often include documenting patient encounters in free text. While EMRs allow free-text notes, only the data residing in structured fields is available for analysis. The way for clinical decision-support tools to be effective is by bringing alerts to physicians and providers in their existing course of action at the point of care, or when they enter both structured and free-text notes. By receiving prompts while the clinician is with the patient in the exam room, physicians and other healthcare providers may alter treatments and courses of care to reduce variances and drive improved outcomes.

A New England Journal of Medicine column, titled “Off the Record — Avoiding the Pitfalls of Going Electronic,” warns that structured text fields, namely drop-down menus and discrete data fields lead physicians “to ask restrictive questions rather than engaging in a narrative-based, open-ended dialogue,” which can be “key to making the correct diagnosis and to understanding which treatment best fits a patient’s beliefs and needs.”

The same is true of a robust clinical decision support tool. To be truly effective, a guidance tool must offer prompts based on the complete clinical picture of a patient, comprised of information recorded by a physician’s structured and narrative notes.

Is your health organization taking measures to analyze free-text notes of clinicians?

What have been your biggest pain points associated with this approach?

EMR and HIPAA guest author Susan White covers in depth how a lack of connectivity standards affects EMR integration. There are no mandated standards for EMR vendors to follow, making it hard to coordinate data sharing between medical devices and other systems (including from one EMR to another), even at the same facility. As those systems operate in disparate fashions, critical clinical information is often lost or stuck in silos. Most importantly, the information is not where clinicians need it most–at their fingertips, in an exam room, with a patient.

This lack of data sharing is a pervasive concern. One Markle report finds that roughly 80 percent of both consumers and physicians demand that hospitals and doctors be required to share information that improves coordination of care, cuts unnecessary costs, and reduces medical errors.

In 2010, more than $88 Billion were spent on developing and implementing EHRs, health information exchanges (HIEs) and other health IT initiatives. When you consider that the average 10-physician practice spends more than $137,000 per year on prior authorizations and pharmacy callbacks alone, you’ll have to agree that the lack of data integration and sharing get very costly. And although I agree with John Halamka, who recently wrote these challenges exist because healthcare is inherently more complicated than other industries, I am a strong believer that a lot of them can be overcome by the use of smart technology.

We need smart, flexible solutions, which capitalize on existing technologies and require minimal integration. Technologies that employ advanced screen extraction, for example, empower several important improvements in the clinical decision support space such as the capturing and analysis of both free and structured text. A lot of time such solutions are rendered ineffective as they either lack compatibility with leading EMR systems or are too hard to integrate.

As the industry evolves, developing robust protocols for capturing both structured and unstructured data along with standards for data integration and sharing will become increasingly important. With all the data points created on patients every day, we will need a consistent, secure, and reliable way to capture and share patient data among all systems and healthcare providers. What is your experience? What are top data capturing and integration challenges faced by your organization? Looking forward to continuing the dialog and hearing your feedback.

Certification Deems Software Capable of Helping Providers Earn Incentive Payments

(GLEN ALLEN, VA – July 20, 2011) — MedCPU’s Meaningful Use Advisor, version 1.0, has earned certification as a modular Electronic Health Record (EHR), officially deeming the unique compliance advice software capable of enabling providers to qualify for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Tested and certified under the Drummond Group’s Electronic Health Records Office of the National Coordinator Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB) program, the software is 2011/2012 compliant in accordance with the criteria adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

“Accurate and reliable compliance reporting to the federal government is extremely challenging, requiring complex algorithms that must take into account historical and current clinical information, exclusion and inclusion criteria, and both narrative and structured data that may be located in multiple places in the EHR and in multiple IT systems” says Eyal Ephrat, MD, founder and chief executive officer of MedCPU. “MedCPU’s Meaningful Use Advisor is equipped with several advanced technologies that allow it to successfully address these challenges and generate the most comprehensive and accurate compliance reports, helping hospitals and providers earn incentive dollars while allowing clinicians to use the most efficient workflow,”

Drummond Group’s ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification program tests and certifies that EHRs meet the meaningful use criteria for either eligible provider or hospital technology. In turn, healthcare providers using the EHR systems of certified vendors are qualified to receive federal stimulus monies upon demonstrating meaningful use of the technology — a key component of the federal government’s push to improve clinical care delivery through the adoption and effective use of EHRs by U.S. healthcare providers.

“The need to leverage information technology in the healthcare industry is huge – as the quality of care and efficiency benefits that come with computerization can really make a difference in the overall patient experience. We’re ready to help transform the industry by providing the sophisticated software testing services that ensure that vendors and hospitals are offering systems that are capable of meeting the meaningful use standards required to obtain incentive funds as well as the rich functionality required to move the clinical care needle forward,” says Rik Drummond, CEO of the Drummond Group. “We have been testing software for more than a decade and are ready to leverage our extensive experience handling sophisticated systems in complex industries as well as dealing with complicated technical issues such as interoperability and security.”

This EHR Module is 2011/2012 compliant and has been certified by Drummond Group, an ONC-ATCB approved to certify any complete or modular EHR both ambulatory and inpatient, in accordance with the applicable certification criteria adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This certification does not represent an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or guarantee the receipt of incentive payments. MedCPU, July 14, 2011, Version 1.0, Certification ID number 07142011?1173?8, Clinical Quality Measures Certified NQF0013, NQF0018, NQF0024, NQF0028, NQF0032, NQF0038, NQF0041, NQF0059, NQF0064, NQF0421.

About MedCPU

MedCPU Inc. is dedicated to improving the delivery of high-quality patient care through the use of its revolutionary Expert Advisor™ technology: a real-time clinical decision support platform designed to deliver numerous guideline and best practice packages across the entire clinical spectrum, without requiring changes in the clinicians’ documentation workflow. MedCPU’s founding multi-disciplinary team has been leading the field of clinical intelligence systems for over 16 years, delivering intelligent error reduction software systems to hospitals in the United States. MedCPU applications include clinical and compliance support solutions. For more information, visit www.medcpu.com

About Drummond Group

Drummond Group Inc., the trusted software test lab, provides effective and efficient electronic health record (EHR) testing to healthcare information technology vendors and hospitals. As an Office of the National Coordinator Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB), Drummond Group works closely with healthcare software vendors and hospitals to certify EHRs that are looking to qualify for incentive funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Drummond Group is approved to certify both complete and modular EHR for both ambulatory and inpatient. Leveraging more than a decade’s worth of interoperability, conformance testing and certification experience in multiple industries, Drummond Group delivers what’s needed in healthcare: highly reliable and readily affordable software testing services. For more information, go to www.drummondgroup.com.

Ranked number one in all five, consecutive KLAS® reports* on labor and delivery systems, the OBIX Perinatal Data System is a comprehensive, computerized system for central, bedside and remote electronic fetal monitoring. The system includes archiving, point-of-care charting and Internet-based physician access. The OBIX System’s exclusive E-Tools for EFM Assessment provide decision support that helps clinicians improve their practice, educate their staff and promote patient safety in electronic fetal monitoring.

“We are delighted to be able to provide such powerful clinical knowledge technology to our customers,” said Kim Sell, President of CCSI. “By partnering with MedCPU, we believe clinicians will have access to the most advanced obstetric decision support system available, one that offers a significant opportunity for the improvement of care, enhancement of patient safety and reduction of costs.” Pat Dwyer, Director of Business Development, added “Our relationship with MedCPU reaffirms our commitment to providing our customers the best possible decision support tools, tools that can help manage clinical complexity and promote best practices.”

“Our collaboration with CCSI gives clinicians the industry’s most accurate clinical decision support at the point of care, bridging free-text documentation, information in structured EMR fields, and now data from the OBIX Perinatal Data System,” says Eyal Ephrat, MD, an obstetrician, founder and Chief Executive Officer of MedCPU. “The approach allows clinicians to continue documenting the way they prefer, while benefiting from a highly accurate real-time clinical decision support that ‘sees’ the complete clinical picture of the patient, independently of where the data is documented or in which format.””

About MedCPU:

MedCPU Inc. is dedicated to improving the delivery of high quality patient care through the use of its revolutionary Expert Advisor™ technology: a real-time clinical decision support platform designed to deliver numerous guideline and best practice packages across the entire clinical spectrum, without requiring changes in the clinicians’ documentation workflow. MedCPU’s founding multi-disciplinary team has been leading the field of clinical intelligence systems for over 16 years, delivering intelligent error reduction software systems to hospitals in the US. MedCPU applications include clinical and compliance support solutions. For more information, visit www.medcpu.com

ABOUT CCSI:

Clinical Computer Systems, Inc. (CCSI) is an employee-owned, high-technology company located in Elgin, Illinois. The company’s business is dedicated exclusively to the development, marketing and support of the OBIX Perinatal Data System. For over 20 years, CCSI has been a leader in perinatal data systems with innovative, customer-driven, computer-based solutions and support services. The company’s total-system approach includes the support of locally-dedicated, expert service and support specialists. Its Success-Focused Education Program trains all users in an onsite, multi-phase, quality-assured process that has enabled thousands of clinicians to successfully adapt to electronic point-of-care charting. Find out more by visitin www.obix.com.

* The research findings were published in the December 2010 KLAS® report, “2010 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software and Professional Services”; September 2010 KLAS report, “Labor & Delivery 2010: Who’s Evolving, Supporting, and Integrating?”; December 2009 KLAS report, “2009 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software and Professional Services”; December 2008 KLAS report, “2008 Top 20 Best in KLAS Awards: Software and Professional Services”; March 2008 KLAS report, “Labor and Delivery” For more information about KLAS reports, visit www.KLASresearch.com or contact Steve Van Wagenen at steve@KLASresearch.com.

The deployment of MedCPU’s Expert Advisor™ for OB will provide Virtua’s clinicians an innovative real-time decision support tool. MedCPU’s Expert Advisor solution is a critical element of such an initiative as it:

• Continuously monitors the patients’ clinical situation and clinical care provided, and issues real-time patient-specific prompts and alerts to caregivers when variance is identified from expected care, based on the hospital’s best practices.
• Easily integrates with most existing EMR systems as a simple “add on“ application.
• Extracts all critically important data elements from the patient’s chart including the clinicians’ free text narrative notes along with the more standard EMR structured field formats. Enabling the capture of nearly 100% of the relevant patient information through the use of MedCPU’s proprietary Medical Text Processor (MTP) technology.
• Incorporates a comprehensive set of critical evidence based rules, protocols, best practices and regulatory requirements needed within its Best Practices Knowledgebase for OB.

“Virtua’s focus on supporting its clinicians with the best available clinical IT tools makes MedCPU a natural partner,” said Alfred Campanella, Virtua’s Vice President & CIO. “MedCPU is truly honored to be selected by Virtua, a recognized technology leader in healthcare,” said Eyal Ephrat M.D., MedCPU’s CEO.

About Virtua:

Virtua, a comprehensive healthcare organization headquartered in Marlton, NJ is southern NJ’s largest healthcare system. Virtua ensures unparalleled quality care through the area’s top clinicians supported by advanced clinical and informational technology and state-of-the-art medical equipment. Virtua has formed innovative strategic alliances with nationally renowned organizations such as Fox Chase Cancer Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and GE. Virtua has also distinguished itself by becoming one of the first Six Sigma, Change Management and Lean organizations in healthcare. It has been recognized five years in a row as the “#1 Best Employer in the Delaware Valley” by the Philadelphia Business Journal.

About MedCPU:

MedCPU Inc. is dedicated to improving the delivery of high quality patient care through the use of advanced real-time clinical expert tools. MedCPU’s clinical decision support platform includes the Expert Advisor suite of real-time expert tools that work with any EMR along with the Compliance Advisor suite of products aimed at assuring compliance with the increasingly complex regulations facing health care providers today. MedCPU’s tools uniquely work within clinicians’ existing workflow and fully utilize clinicians’ narrative text entries via its proprietary Medical Text Processor technology to get the complete clinical picture for each patient and generate accurate prompts for assuring best clinical care is provided.

For additional information please contact:

Sonia Ben Yehuda President MedCPU Inc. Sonia@MedCPU.com
Ernie Berger COO/CFO MedCPU Inc. Eberger@MedCPU.com
MedCPU Inc. 1 (212) 996-1991

Hope to see you there!

WHEN: Monday, February 21, 2011 from 6pm-9pm EDT

WHERE: Hilton Orlando, Lake Sheen B: empowersystems Hospitality Suite, 6001 Destination Parkway Orlando, FL 32819

RSVP: Christopher Alise, Empower Systems, (305) 766-3245 direct, calise@empower.md | www.empower.md

“Meeting meaningful use requirements is an important objective for us,” said George Brenckle, PhD, senior vice president and Chief Information Officer for UMass Memorial Health Care, “but equally important is finding tools that can aide compliance while allowing our clinicians to continue to deliver outstanding care and without interfering with their already demanding workflow. With MedCPU, we’re aiming to deliver very targeted alerts that will be helpful but not intrusive.”

MedCPU’s Meaningful Use Advisor™ is a real-time clinical decision support tool that rides on top most hospital and ambulatory electronic medical records and ‘reads’ the complete clinical information contained in the EMR, clinicians’ free text notes and structured fields alike. With its unique capability to acquire patient information across multiple systems and different formats, coupled with a powerful decision support engine and a complete, highly granular set of Meaningful Use guidelines, the Meaningful Use Advisor is able to accurately identify the clinical context of each patient encounter and determine whether compliance with the relevant Meaningful Use requirements is achieved. In cases of identified compliance deficiency, the tool prompts the physician at the right time for missing compliance elements, assuring the compliance requirements are met. Its unique ability to identify the accurate compliance status, based on the case specific clinical context, enables the Meaningful Use Advisor to avoid presenting the physicians with distracting redundant prompts and to generate accurate compliance reports for each physician.

“We are aiming to reach very high sensitivity and specificity targets for the clinical prompts we’re generating as a key component for physician adoption and efficient use of our IT tools,” said Eyal Ephrat, M.D., MedCPU’s CEO “We’re excited to partner with UMass Memorial Health Care in creating the next generation of innovation in healthcare decision support that will enhance quality and patient care”.

About UMass Memorial Health Care:

UMass Memorial Health Care is Central Massachusetts’ largest not-for-profit health care delivery system, covering the complete health care continuum with UMass Memorial Medical Center, its academic medical center, member and affiliated community hospitals, freestanding primary care practices, ambulatory outpatient clinics, hospice programs, and mental health services. UMass Memorial is the clinical partner of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

About MedCPU:

MedCPU Inc. is dedicated to improving the delivery of high quality patient care through the use of advanced real-time clinical expert tools.  MedCPU’s clinical decision support platform includes the Expert Advisor suite of real-time expert tools that work with any EMR along with theCompliance Advisor suite of products aimed at assuring compliance with the increasingly complex regulations facing health care providers today.  MedCPU’s tools uniquely work within clinicians’ existing workflow and fully utilize clinicians’ narrative text entries via its proprietary Medical Text Processor technology to get the complete clinical picture for each patient and generate accurate prompts for assuring best clinical care is provided.