UPMC Partners with dbMotion to Improve Patient Care with Seamless Data Sharing
14 November 2006
Pittsburgh and Raanana, Israel, October 19, 2006 - The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), a leading integrated health care enterprise, and dbMotion, an award-winning provider of web-based data-sharing and integration technology, today announced an $84 million initiative to create one of the largest models of true interoperability in healthcare. dbMotion will receive at least $35 million of this amount, including an investment by UPMC.
dbMotion's unique technology will provide a flexible platform for UPMC's clinicians to securely access integrated patient information across its 19 hospitals and 400 outpatient sites and doctors' offices, without replacing existing systems. The result will be a model of interoperability for the regional and national health information networks that are being promoted by the federal government to improve safety and reduce costs. To facilitate this sweeping initiative, UPMC and dbMotion will also create a joint development effort in Pittsburgh.
"Semantic interoperability - which integrates clinical information from disparate systems - is quintessential for attaining excellence in patient safety and quality of care", said UPMC chief information officer Dan Drawbaugh. "With dbMotion's best-in-class solution, UPMC will achieve a new level of integration, allowing our physicians to have current, relevant patient information and advanced decision support tools at the point of care. Many health-care organizations have been promised advanced interoperability, but, in reality, few solutions are available today. The dbMotion partnership is poised to deliver these solutions nationally and internationally".
As part of the agreement, UPMC and dbMotion will create a joint development partnership to create novel interoperability solutions for the health-care industry. Long recognized for developing and adopting the most advanced technologies, UPMC has been named for eight consecutive years as one of the nation's '100 Most Wired' hospitals by Hospitals & Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association.
"UPMC is known as a forward-thinking and innovative organization, and this project positions it as an early leader in efforts to build new levels of information exchange at UPMC and beyond", said Yuval Ofek, dbMotion's CEO. "We applaud UPMC's decision to take this leadership role and feel our technology will offer the flexibility needed to meet its evolving needs". "By investing in a SOA-based, health-care specific infrastructure, UPMC is tackling head-on the biggest challenge to large health-care organizations - providing fine-grained interoperability that extends beyond simply sharing data to integrating the data into business processes", said Wes Rishel, vice president and research director at Gartner.
UPMC will be one of dbMotion's first US customers. Spun off in 2004 from Ness Technologies (NASDAQ:NSTC), dbMotion's technology is widely deployed in Israel's health system. The dbMotion solution was implemented in 2001 throughout Clalit Health Services, one of the world's largest HMOs with 14 hospitals, 1,300 primary and specialized clinics and 400 pharmacies. Its use was expanded in 2004 to include two of the country's largest independent medical centers. Recognized as one of the most promising startups in Israel, dbMotion has won technology awards for the past two years from the Microsoft Healthcare Users Group (MS-HUG).
