Ingenious Med's IM Quality Measures(TM) Delivers Insight About Hospitalist P...( ATLANTA June 10 /- Information te...),Health

ATLANTA, June 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Information technology has the power "to transform data into information, and information into insight," former Hewlett-Packard Co. executive Carly Fiorina once explained.

Her words aptly describe the power of Ingenious Med's IM Quality Measures(TM), a software package that enables physicians and practice administrators to document, capture, report, and submit quality performance metrics. Physicians and practices that track quality performance can enhance revenues, improve clinical care, and prove practice value to employing hospitals, payors and patients. IM Quality Measures(TM) also helps physicians participate in "pay-for-reporting" and "pay-for-performance" initiatives such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service's (CMS) Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI).

The value of data-to-information-to-insight transformation was demonstrated recently when IM Quality Measures(TM) data helped convinced CMS to preserve several PQRI measures critical to establishing hospitalists as a recognized specialty and positioning them to receive PQRI "pay-for-reporting" bonuses.

CMS does not yet recognize hospital medicine as a specialty. However, the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) wanted hospitalists to have the opportunity to participate in the PQRI. SHM successfully lobbied CMS to get several 2007 performance measure specifications changed so that hospitalists could report on them, said Patrick J. Torcson, MD, MMM, FACP, chairman of the SHM Performance and Standards Committee.

"PQRI performance measures originally were not created with hospitalists in mind so SHM has been very proactive in trying to include measures relevant to hospital medicine," said Torcson, the director of Hospital Medicine at St. Tammany Parish Hospital in Covington, LA.

But when CMS began updating the performance measurement specifications for 2008, several specialty societies requested that specifications for thr
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