When I am asked, “what does MedShare do?” my standard reply is, MedShare uses leading edge mobile technology to fundamentally transform the delivery of home health care services yielding better medical outcomes and improved operational results.
MedShare’s vision has always incorporated mobile technology as a prerequisite for empowering mobile workers in the home health care sector.  Other care sectors are also seeing the benefits of mobile Health Information Technology and have begun to create new categories for what we do.

mHealth (aka mobile Health Information Technology) is a new industry term that is emerging to describe the delivery of medical services supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, BlackBerrys and tablet computing devices.  mHealth is gaining more recognition as a method to empower health care workers in a decentralised health delivery model including home health.

Telehealth is the delivery of health-related services and information via telecommunications technologies, teleconferencing sites for remote communities.  According to Canada Health Infoway, Telehealth Solutions are evolving into more complex and diverse solutions that involve real-time monitoring and/or store and forward capabilities.  MedShare for BlackBerry and MedShare eMotion both fit the definition of a “store and forward” Telehealth solution.

Remote Patient Monitoring is a flavour of telehealth used for remotely monitoring patients by recording their vital signs and self reported health status. Our clients are becoming tech savvy and demanding more from the health care system and they deserve the best care we can deliver.  One of my fears is that we put computers and device in the hands of the home care clients before we invest in technology for nurses, therapists and home care workers. 

MedShare’s vision includes the term “fundamental transform” which really captures the essence of our value in the home care market.  We are discarding the old methods and processes built on paper, fax, cell phones, pagers, voice mail, snail mail and replacing it with mobile technology that matches the work setting of our clients.

But it’s not really about the technology and the labels we put on the latest and greatest tools in the marketplace.  It’s the people, our clients and their staff, who are transforming the delivery of home health care.  I’d like to recognise all the hard work and time invested by our clients.  Thank you.

Barry Billings, President, MedShare
barry.billings@medshare.com

Community Rehab would like to announce the successful launch of MedShare HC throughout their 4 offices in Ontario.  In 2006, CR began replacing inefficient paper-based processes with electronic administration and documentation tools from MedShare.   By the Spring of this year, the majority of their health care workers will be deployed on MedShare HC, making them the largest customer to be using MedShare to date.  Of the 260 users, many will be able to create their own visits, track their time and be responsible for managing client care by having direct access to the software.  This will empower the therapists and allow them to be more efficient in their jobs while reducing the need for paper and fax.

MedShare is pleased to announce that the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) has chosen to support MedShare’s continued innovative approach to delivering mobile wireless solutions for home care agencies. 
The IRAP program supports innovative companies creating products that will help change the landscape of their market.  MedShare is developing a second generation of the MedShare Enterprise Server, to better serve their current clients with a more robust, secure, and scalable architecture.  This will allow our clients to connect to client data faster with more reliability, while expanding our product offering to smaller companies that do not have the server infrastructure to support our current MES.

The program is a collaborative effort, as IRAP not only provides financial support, but IRAP has become a key partner for MedShare moving forward.  IRAP is able to provide MedShare with consulting services, research opportunities, connections, and technical expertise.  Barry Billings, MedShare’s President and CEO states “We are hoping to leverage our relationship with the National Research Council and the Industrial Research Assistance Program to support MedShare and increase MedShare’s research and development investment that will benefit our current customers as well as expanding our reach outside of our current customer base”. 

IRAP’s support will help the advancement of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in Canada.  MedShare’s technology will allow secure storage, access, and visibility of these EMR’s to nurses and other medical professionals at the point of care.  Secondly, MedShare hopes that future advancements will allow nurses to contribute to the EMR at the point of care, creating a real-time EMR.

MedShare is looking forward to working with IRAP on this project, but also future projects to create innovative technology for the home care industry.

Pace Homecare is pleased to report the successful completion of phase I testing of the care planning module for MedShare HC. Over the past several months Pace’s administrative team has successfully collected and entered care plan data for several thousand clients.

According to Angela Hovey, Vice President Services and Operations, "The care planning module in MedShare HC is a powerful tool that captures a wide breadth of important clinical data including information about the client’s rehabilitation issues, the interventions that are planned by the practitioner, as well as the outcome of the services delivered. This system will provide our organization with the capability to analyze healthcare data in a more comprehensive and meaningful way. For example, we now have the capability to analyze a much larger volume of clinical data to more accurately report on areas such as client goal attainment and to create a better understanding of the efficacy of particular rehabilitation interventions. The care planning module will help us better understand what we do and ultimately allow us to deliver higher quality healthcare services for our clients.”

The next phase of Pace’s testing will expand the care planning module to allow ‘self service’ capability for healthcare workers. Practitioners will create, update and manage a client’s care plan within MedShare HC (remotely and securely) and this information will be seamlessly communicated with the administrative team.

We have recently launched a formal privacy program within MedShare.  Building on our existing culture of privacy, we have developed series of privacy-focussed policies and procedures with a dual focus:

1. to ensure that our products continue to meet the highest privacy and security standard
2. to train our staff to be diligent in their efforts to protect the privacy of individuals receiving care from our customers.

Our policies ensure that personal information is treated with respect and prudence and is disposed of in a secure manner when no longer required to perform our duties.

If you have questions about privacy protection at MedShare, please e-mail us at privacy@medshare.com

The next HCUG meeting is April 30th, in Cambridge, ON.

For more details please contact Alex Fuellos at AFuellos@commrehab.com

MedShare launched the MS Support Report in early February and received very positive feedback.  We will continue to adjust the report moving forward to include more details to reflect when issues have been updated and resolved.