Clara Maass Medical Center, a 465-bed community hospital in Belleville, N.J., that's affiliated with the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, is boosting health information exchange for its physicians.

The hospital will use San Jose, Calif.-based Axolotl's Elysium Exchange for Hospitals to enable digital information distribution, connecting hospitals to ambulatory care electronic medical records systems and providing a smaller version of an EMR for physicians not yet electronically enabled.

The EMR-Lite is a browser-based management tool that can be readily deployed to any admitting practice, enabling hospitals to distribute data to affiliated physicians electronically. It has most of the clinical data functionality of a full EMR, including an optional e-prescribing module, but costs little more than basic cell phone service.

"The rise of EMR adoption in ambulatory practices is driving demand for clinical data delivery," said Donald Lutz, chief information officer at Clara Maass Medical Center. "Physicians don't want to have to go looking for data on their patients. They want to be notified when new information is available and receive relevant clinical data automatically in a format that is useful and manageable. Axolotl's technology solves this challenge while also providing an affordable well rounded EMR Lite product for our ambulatory physicians."

Physicians at Clara Maass Medical Center will be able to receive clinical information directly into their tool of choice by an EMR, the EMR Lite or fax.
They'll also be able to communicate with disparate EMRs using the Elysium Clinical Network.

Axolotl's Elysium Virtual Health Record is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the patient, allowing authorized physicians to electronically locate, connect to and review a holistic patient chart that is physically scattered across multiple healthcare systems.

"In the past, patients would arrive in the emergency department or a new physician's office with no patient history available," said Thomas A. Biga, executive director at Clara Maass Medical Center. "With a patient's approval, the Elysium VHR allows authorized clinicians to retrieve relevant information instantly. This comprehensive view of the patient will drastically reduce drug interactions, unnecessary tests and treatments and enable the doctor to quickly and efficiently administer care."