Cutting edge Sea Mar Community Health Centers makes $1 million decision to implement Misys EMR to improve patient care
Mexican President Vicente Fox Visits Federally Qualified Health Center to Personally View Practice's Efforts to Serve Low-Income, Underserved and Uninsured Communities in western Washington
RALEIGH, N.C. - June 5, 2006 - Misys Healthcare Systems, a market leader in healthcare IT, today announced that Seattle, Washington-based Sea Mar Community Health Centers, one of the largest providers of health and human services in the country, has selected Misys EMR® in a $1 million deal designed to enhance patient care by improving customer service, access to care, patient flow and staff efficiency. Sea Mar's decision to implement the integrated electronic medical records solution into its existing practice management solution comes as a direct result of the practice's current use of Misys Vision®, a powerful enterprise practice management system that includes a comprehensive suite of patient management, administrative and reporting applications. In addition to working to implement its EMR solution, Sea Mar, a Federally Qualified Health Center, last week hosted the President of Mexico, Vicente Fox. President Fox visited the center because of Sea Mar's mission to serve the uninsured and underserved of Washington State with special emphasis on serving the Latino population, many of whom originally come from or make their permanent home in Mexico.
Sea Mar anticipates a planned roll-out of Misys EMR to all of its centers, beginning with its medical clinics by the end of November 2006. This will be followed up by bringing its dental offices online by February 2007, with all other departments fully utilizing the solution by May 2007. Through its newly integrated practice management and EMR solutions, Sea Mar hopes to achieve improved customer service, greater office efficiency and more immediate access to patient data and other vital information. The center also anticipates improved productivity, and the ability to care for additional patients, something of vital importance to this under-serviced community.
"When we implemented Misys Vision in 2004, we did so with the long-term goal of integrating an EMR solution down the road," said Shanon Hardie, operations director for Sea Mar Community Health Centers. "One of the first, and the biggest, advantages we realized in selecting and utilizing Misys' integrated solutions was the flexibility to customize templates and reports to suit the various and unique needs of our many departments. While traditional practices offer only medical services, we provide medical (including OB), dental, preventive health and behavioral health services, in addition to a nursing home, childcare center and other social services. Misys understood our needs and offered the flexibility that no other vendor we encountered could."
Sea Mar's implementation of Misys EMR will enable it to connect all of its more than 50 medical physicians, 25 dental providers, 20 preventive health services providers, 50 behavioral health providers, and nearly 900 staff across 30+ sites, providing timely and accurate patient data that will enable those locations to share demographics information for clinical reporting and billing through a common record in a single, centralized database. As a community health center that serves as the last option, the safety net, for the under-insured or uninsured, this private non-profit entity specializes in services to the Latino population. This community relies on word-of-mouth to identify those medical centers it can turn to for much-needed care. During his visit to the center, Mexican President Vicente Fox met with Sea Mar's bi-lingual and bi-cultural staff to view firsthand a demonstration of the innovative services the center provides to Washington State's residents, citizens and temporary, migrant workers who hail from Mexico.
"Many medical offices today shy away from treating those individuals who are uninsured or under-insured because they lack the funding to absorb the high costs of medical care, but Sea Mar serves every member of the western Washington communities, charging based on family size and income," said Rob Kill, president of the Physician Systems Business Unit for Misys Healthcare Systems. "This truly is a unique organization that provides continuity of care through an interdisciplinary approach. We look forward to helping Sea Mar deliver ever more effective and efficient medical services through the use of Misys' electronic record keeping solutions."
About Sea Mar Community Health Centers
Sea Mar Community Health Centers was organized by a group of Latino community leaders and health activists who dreamed of developing a comprehensive health center for the Latino community in Seattle, with satellite clinics in rural communities in western Washington. For the past 27 years, Sea Mar has consistently provided innovative leadership at the local, regional, and national levels in the delivery of bilingual and culturally appropriate health care and social services. In 2005, Sea Mar served nearly 86,000 clients providing more than 324,000 visits across 30 sites. Of its clients, nearly 42 percent are Latino, 42 percent have no insurance and 57 percent fall at or below the federal poverty level. For more information, visit Sea Mar on the Web at
http://www.seamar.org.
About Misys Healthcare Systems
Misys Healthcare Systems, one of the top five healthcare IT companies in North America, develops and supports reliable, easy-to-use software and services of exceptional quality that enable physicians and caregivers to more easily manage the complexities of healthcare. Misys' family of leading clinical products and Web-based technologies - Misys Optimum™ solutions - are designed from the ground up to share patient data across all medical care settings. Misys Optimum connects community-based physicians and caregivers to the acute care enterprise, enabling increased efficiencies, better decision-making and improved hospital-physician relations. For more information, visit
www.misyshealthcare.com.
About Misys plc
Misys plc (FTSE: MSY), the global software company, is one of the world's largest and longest-established providers of industry-specific software. Founded in 1979, Misys serves the international banking and healthcare industries, combining technological expertise with in-depth understanding of customers' markets and operational needs. In banking Misys is a market leader with over 1,200 customers, including 49 of the world's top 50 banks. In healthcare Misys is also a market leader, serving more than 110,000 physicians in 18,000 practice locations, 1,200 hospitals and 600 home care providers. Through Sesame, a wholly-owned subsidiary, the company is also a leading provider of support services to about 7,800 financial advisers in the UK. Misys employs around 6,000 people who serve customers in more than 120 countries. For more information, visit
www.misys.com.
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