16 Mar East Tennessee Health Information Network Selects IMAT Solutions for Big Data Management after Extensive, Multi-year Search

March 17, 2016, Orem, UT — East Tennessee Health Information Network (etHIN), a non-profit, joint community Health Information Exchange serving 1.6 million patients across 20 counties in East Tennessee, and IMAT Solutions, a leader in delivering innovative, real-time, healthcare data management and reporting technologies, announced today that etHIN will implement the IMAT platform to support its base of local hospitals, physicians and community healthcare providers.

The IMAT Foundation Services, IMAT EMPI (enterprise master patient index), Consolidated Patient Chart, Clinical Reports, and Medical Analytics modules will facilitate full content data aggregation, normalization code mapping, analysis, and reporting from across all data stores to help etHIN deliver improved quality, efficiencies and reporting to its provider network.

etHIN began looking at available data management platforms 2½ years ago.  Leigh Sterling, Executive Director of etHIN, explained, “Our community’s needs have been evolving over the years, driven by the ever changing use cases and Federal initiatives facing our clients, and we had already added a lot of additional technology to meet those needs.  In looking at our community’s requirements going forward, we knew that now was the time to put in a next generation platform that would be highly scalable and provide the components we could build upon.”

After reviewing existing capabilities, etHIN determined it needed enhancements in the following areas:

• More access to configuration options and customization tools
• Stronger reporting and analytics, and
• The ability to include unstructured data captured in physician notes and transcriptions as part of the reportable data sets.

etHIN conducted an extensive search and evaluation of numerous vendors during their technology selection process.  The key criteria were:

1. Robust, high speed eMPI (enterprise master patient index) with multiple, configurable algorithms to enhance patient matching
2. NLP (natural language processing) to enhance the richness of the data
3. Analytics fully integrated with the HIE stack
4. Strong rules engine with automatic processing capabilities
5. Highly configurable Clinical Viewer
6. Ability for the HIE to assume 95% or more of the onboarding, configuration and administrative tasks

“We had a comprehensive requirements document that IMAT and others responded to,” said Sterling.  “IMAT’s scored responses, demos, and deep dive discussions with etHIN showed us that they would be able to meet all of our needs.”

Once fully implemented, which should be by June of this year, etHIN looks forward to strengthening the reporting options it offers to healthcare providers who are utilizing the etHIN network, including stronger Quality, eMeasures, HEDIS® and Star reporting, and richer, accessible data from narrative documents.

Kurt Garbe, CEO of IMAT Solutions, said, “After such a competitive and comprehensive vendor selection process, we are thrilled that etHIN has selected IMAT Solutions as their next generation, scalable platform. We look forward to working with etHIN to improve healthcare services by combining our expertise in data aggregation, normalization, code mapping and analytics with etHIN’s robust client base.”

About East Tennessee Health Information Network (etHIN)

etHIN is a non-profit, joint community initiative established in 2005 to serve the needs of patients and healthcare providers in East Tennessee. etHIN’s purpose is to create and manage a secure healthcare information network that is used by authorized healthcare providers, supports improving patient outcomes, and helps to potentially lower the cost of healthcare. etHIN’s community members, now spanning more than 20 counties, include local hospital systems, physicians, and other community healthcare providers that provide healthcare services to 1.6 million patients. To learn more about etHIN, visit: http://www.ethin.org/

About IMAT Solutions

IMAT Solutions was formed in 2013 to provide key innovations in data accessibility, analysis, and reporting to healthcare organizations. The product suite is HIPAA-compliant, supporting customers across eight states, processing billions of records per year for more than 2,000 facilities, involving 18 million patients and 31,000 providers. IMAT enables clients to improve care, increase efficiency and decrease cost. It also addresses the challenge of managing, normalizing and querying huge data sets in real-time, enabling users to access structured and unstructured (physician’s notes, transcripts) patient information.  IMAT’s modules make it a flexible solution that can be tailored to each organization’s needs.  To learn more about IMAT Solutions, visit: https://imatsolutions.com/

HEDIS® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)