Cerner is partnering with San Jose, Calif.-based Certify Data Systems to improve the sharing of information between providers using the company's Cerner Hub platform.

Certify's 
HealthDock is designed to enable the electronic flow of clinical data securely between hospitals and physician practice settings. Officials at both companies say the integration of HealthDock with the Cerner Hub will help reduce the amount of paper passed between hospitals, physicians, reference labs, imaging centers and other care settings.

As more organizations implement electronic health record systems to take advantage of the incentives offered through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Cerner officials said, they'll need solutions to improve connectivity.

"Ease of connectivity is a vital missing ingredient to widespread physician acceptance of EHRs," said Zane Burke, senior vice president of the Kansas City, Mo.-based company. "We identified Certify's HealthDock appliance as the best connectivity solution to enhance Cerner Hub services and to achieve Cerner's commitment to achieve true interoperability. The Cerner Hub and the Certify HealthDock create a disruptive offering that simplifies information sharing across the care continuum no matter what EHRs are in use."

The integration is designed to allow the sharing of clinical information from patient visits such as test results, radiology reports, discharge summaries and other clinical reports. Cener officials said the information is transferred real-time into physician practice EHRs.

"Cerner and Certify share a common goal to help clinicians make informed decisions about patient care by providing them with the right information at the right time," said Marc Willard, Certify's founder and CEO. "The HealthDock will enable the Cerner Hub to share important clinical information seamlessly with primary care providers and specialists."

Cerner officials said the combination of the Cerner Hub and HealthDock is designed to:

• Eliminate the need for hospital IT staff to spend time and money developing interfaces between multiple physician practice EHR systems;
• Improve the speed of data sharing through a real-time, secure, HIPAA-compliant network;
• Provide hospitals and physician practices with complete auditing and delivery guarantees; and
• Incorporate a distributed patient matching process that enables physician offices to ensure clinical information is delivered into the appropriate patient chart.

"Before we had the Certify HealthDock our nurses were spending two days a week re-keying the hospital's lab results into our EMR," said Robert Middleton, a cardiologist at Cardiovascular Consultants in Auburn, Wash. "Now they focus that time on patient care. The amount of time this has saved our physicians, nursing staff and medical records team has been significant. The electronic merging with our EMR has been effortless and continues to allow our staff to get results to patients in a timely manner."