Holmdel, NJ Jan 25, 2011 – Sparta Systems, Inc., the maker of TrackWise® quality management software and the market leader in enterprise quality and compliance management solutions, today announced that it will present at the Institute of Validation Technology’s (IVT) upcoming 9th Annual Change Control Conference in a session titled, “Implementing an Enterprise-Level Change Control Solution – A Complex Process,” on Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011, from 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Sparta will also present at IVT’s co-located Quality Risk Management Conference in a session titled “Integrating a Risk Management System with a Quality Management Solution,” on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011, from 1:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
The current economic environment has forced companies to streamline their quality operations and more effectively harmonize processes across the global organization. Additionally, regulatory pressures stemming from high-profile product safety incidents have made it imperative for organizations to bolster their investments in technology as a way of minimizing risk and ensuring quality in the supply chain. As the global leader in quality management software solutions, Sparta Systems will offer attendees to these sessions proven strategies for leveraging technology to standardize change across the organization and integrating quality management and risk management solutions for a complete, enterprise-wide approach to these mission-critical functions.
WHO: Tim Mohn, Industry Principal for Sparta Systems and former Manager, Worldwide Quality Systems for Johnson & Johnson Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics
WHEN: “Implementing an Enterprise-Level Change Control Solution – A Complex Process” Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011, 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
“Integrating a Risk Management System with a Quality Management Solution”
Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011, 1:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
WHERE: Sir Francis Drake Hotel
450 Powell Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Category: news
Oso BioPharmaceuticals Taps Craig Mastenbaum to Lead West Coast Business Development
Albuquerque, NM Jan 19, 2011 – OSO BioPharmaceuticals Manufacturing, LLC, has named Craig Mastenbaum director of new business development for its West Coast market.
Mastenbaum brings to OsoBio more than 30 years of leadership experience in clinical and contract liquid, lyophilized, ampule and syringe product manufacturing. Most recently, he was senior director for clinical and contract manufacturing for Dendreon Corp., a biotechnology company that develops anti-cancer agents.
“Craig has personally directed both the in-house and outsourced manufacturing of complex, sterile liquid pharmaceutical products and been responsible for ensuring key performance and quality assurance indicators,” said Milton Boyer, vice president of business development and sales. “He understands exactly what clients are looking for and how OsoBio can best meet their needs.”
Previously, Mastenbaum served as vice president of manufacturing and business development at Hollister-Stier Laboratories, where he quadrupled contract revenues, and as director of parenteral operations at Chiron Corp. He holds a bachelor’s of arts degree in microbiology from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in business administration from Gonzaga University.
Paragon Medical Announces Opening of Bioskills Lab
Pierceton, IN Jan 19, 2011
Pierceton based Paragon Medical announced today the official opening of its new Bioskills Lab at its headquarters in Pierceton, Indiana. Company management and employees were joined at a ribbon cutting on January 19, 2011 by the Warsaw / Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce and other local officials to commemorate this important event for the company and the community.
In December 2009, Paragon announced that through its Orthopaedic Instrument Global Design Center (OIGDC), it would accelerate the construction of this new lab in direct support of OrthoWorx, a Warsaw-based industry, community and education initiative established to advance and support growth and innovation within the region’s globally significant orthopaedics device sector.
The fully staffed facility is ready for client scheduling and includes capacity for up to four cadaveric evaluation stations and targets the comfort of lab attendees through ergonomic tables, laminar airflow, separate temperature zones, and a private conference room with a viewing window into the lab. A multitude of other services are available upon request including specimen procurement and preparation, instrument cleanup in a state of the art instrument disinfection system, C-Arm and Arthroscopy Tower rentals, audio-visual connectivity, and full catering capabilities.
According to Van Flamion, Director of the Bioskills Lab and Paragon’s OIGDC, “The lab was designed and constructed for the sole purpose of providing our customers a convenient, cost effective, full service facility where orthopaedic and other medical device companies can perform cadaveric studies on their products and / or train their surgeons or field representatives on surgical techniques pertaining to their products”.
Mr. Flamion also commented that a soft launch phase was conducted with a limited and controlled number of labs during the fourth quarter of 2010. The Bioskills Lab exercised its logistics as a full service facility while gathering critical customer feedback to ensure optimization prior to going to its now full-launch status.
For lab scheduling or additional information you can contact the Bioskills Lab directly or visit their website at paragonmedical.com/bioskillslab.
Geisinger Health System, Precyse Solutions and M*Modal Announce Strategic Partnership to Improve Clinical Documentation and Billing Efficiency
Danville and Wayne, PA Jan 11, 2011 – Danville and Wayne, Pa., January 11, 2011—Precyse Solutions, a leader in health information management (HIM) services and technologies, M*Modal, a pioneer of advanced speech understanding technologies, natural language processing (NLP), and provider of on-‐demand conversational documentation, and Geisinger Health System, widely recognized for its implementation of innovative care models, today announced a first-‐of-‐its-‐kind partnership to improve clinical documentation and coding accuracy.
Precyse’s automated, clinical documentation and natural language processing-‐enabled (NLP) coding software features a robust, ICD-‐10-‐ready, NLP-‐assisted coding engine driven by state-‐of-‐the-‐art NLP technology from M*Modal, that processes and understands human voice converting it to text and transforming it to information. This NLP-‐enabled, automated coding technology bridges Geisinger’s electronic health record (EHR), dictation, transcription, coding and clinical documentation improvement (CDI) processes by capturing physician dictation, editing it, coding it and directing it into Geisinger’s EHR software platform.
Geisinger physicians will be able to dictate directly into the EHR with minimal impact to their current workflow patterns. Clinical information is electronically tagged to be easily searched, mined and analyzed by healthcare team members responsible for driving hospital care and outcomes. This solution will also accelerate an organization’s attainment of HITECH Meaningful Use.
The Precyse, M*Modal and Geisinger partnership will redesign revenue cycle workflow and will enhance coding efficiency while enabling fast and efficient responsiveness to physician queries. The partners aim to see this collaborative technology replicated across the country.
This single solution provides a snap shot of all necessary management, resource, and reporting tools for mission-‐ critical health information management processes on one platform, easily monitored and managed through an easy-‐to-‐follow dashboard.
“Geisinger is eager to work with Precyse Solutions and M*Modal to innovate an enterprise-‐wide solution to physician documentation in the EHR, creating vast opportunities for improvement across the documentation continuum,” noted Joan Topper, Vice President, IT Optimization, Geisinger Health System.
“Precyse is committed to finding newer and better ways to capture and format the clinical narrative to maintain health data integrity, drive EHR adoption and enable Meaningful Use compliance for our clients.” said Jeffrey Levitt, CEO and Founder, Precyse Solutions. “The reality today is that EHR implementation, adoption, and attaining Meaningful Use are major challenges for healthcare facilities and clinicians. Together with M*Modal, Precyse accepts physician affinity for dictation and transcription while meeting the facility’s objectives for improved healthcare delivery and superior information management. We are confident that this transformative partnership with Geisinger will surely generate extraordinary results.”
About Geisinger Health System
Geisinger is a an integrated health services organization widely recognized for its innovative use of the electronic health record, and the development and implementation of innovative care models including advanced medical home and ProvenCare® (“warranty”) program. The system serves more than 2.6 million residents throughout 42 counties in central and northeastern Pennsylvania. For more information, visit www.geisinger.org.
U.S. HealthWorks Acquires Fairbanks Urgent Care Center
Fairbanks, AK Jan 3, 2011 – U.S. HealthWorks, a leading national operator of occupational healthcare centers, today announced the acquisition of the Fairbanks Urgent Care Center. Located at 1867 Airport Way, Ste.130B, in Fairbanks, the facility will continue to offer urgent care, occupational medicine, and physical therapy services.
Terms of the transaction, effective December 29, 2010, were not disclosed. The move expands the number of U.S. HealthWorks operated medical centers in Alaska to five and nationwide to 134.
“We’re thrilled to expand our footprint in the great northwest and we look forward to serving our new Alaskan clients and patients,” said Dr. Andy Parker, senior vice president of operations. “Dr. Harikian brings with him a top-notch team that will undoubtedly continue to be a success in the region.”
“U.S. HealthWorks, with its national network of physicians and medical centers, will provide added innovation and resources, enabling us to expand the scope of our services,” said Dr. Larry Harikian, who will remain on as the center’s medical director. “Our facility will continue to offer quality medical services to the community, and now we’ll also be able to tap a larger network for added expertise and depth. This will be a very positive change for our patients and clients.”
HealthTech Offers New Medicaid Retroactive Eligibility Service
Franklin, TN Jan 1, 2011 — HealthTech today announced it is offering Medicaid Retroactive Eligibility Services for hospitals that are challenged with reimbursement of healthcare services for self-pay patients.
HealthTech’s Eligibility Service provides a retroactive review of self-pay patients for Medicare or other third-party payment source through one of its data partners. If a patient has qualified to receive financial assistance during the same time frame, the hospital can resubmit claims for back payments.
“We are excited to offer this new service to our clients,” said Derek Morkel, HealthTech CEO and President. “It can be very beneficial especially since there is a growing number of self-pay patients visiting community hospitals every year. It is another way we can help hospitals improve their revenue cycle and overall financial stability.”
U.S. HealthWorks Acquires Adjacent Physical Therapy Practice in Stockton
Stockton, CA Dec 17, 2010 – U.S. HealthWorks, the leading operator of occupational healthcare centers in California, today announced that it has acquired the Stockton location of Xcel Orthopaedic Physical Therapy, located adjacent to the company’s Stockton West facility at 1429 West Fremont Street.
“We’re pleased to expand our services to include on-site physical therapy at our Stockton West location,” said Therese Hernandez, senior vice president of operations for U.S. HealthWorks in California. “Bringing Xcel Orthopaedic Physical Therapy into our group makes tremendous sense, given its location next to our Stockton West facility.”
The West Fremont center is a health facility focused on providing injury and illness diagnosis and treatment, preventive services, pre-employment and post-offer exams and testing, return-to-work programs, and now on-site physical therapy. Terms of the transaction, which was effective Dec. 17, were not disclosed.
“The addition of physical therapy to our current offerings will not only provide our clients and patients with an important service, but it’ll also allow for quicker and effective treatment by simplifying communication and paperwork,” said James L. Sepiol M.D., the center’s medical director.
Geisinger Health System, Precyse Solutions and M*Modal Announce Strategic Partnership to Improve Clinical Documentation and Billing Efficiency
Danville and Wayne, PA Dec 16, 2010 — Precyse Solutions, LLC, a health care technology-‐enabled services company, today announced that it has been named one of the two top medical transcription service organizations (MTSOs) in the 2010 KLAS “Transcription Services: Competition, Technology, Consolidation” report. Precyse received the second highest overall performance ranking, with its score less than a half point behind the first‐place vendor. Moreover, Precyse’s 2010 score of 91.7 exceeded the 2009 score of last year’s top vendor and improved upon Precyse’s 90.4 score in 2009. Precyse provides hospitals and physicians with the most advanced dictation‐transcription software platform, deploying sophisticated automated speech understanding and natural language processing technologies along with its extensive transcription services organization.
Key findings of the 2010 KLAS report include:
• Precyse received an overall score of 91.7 out of 100.
• Precyse received the highest score in Report Quality, a key differentiator in client satisfaction.
• On a scale of 1 – 9, Precyse was the highest-scoring vendor in the categories of Money’s Worth (8.5) and Real Problem Resolution (8.5) and was tied for the highest score for Quality of Service Staff (8.3). In addition, Precyse was the only vendor to be rated above average in three of the four service categories.
• 100% of surveyed Precyse clients said Precyse keeps its promises and that they would continue to do business with Precyse.
• Precyse demonstrated its ability to meet client expectations for both domestic and international transcription, and had the highest domestic transcription score.
• Precyse received 100% positive comments from clients in the area of Project Results.
• KLAS named Precyse one of only a few vendors who have made a serious investment in Administrative Tools, another key differentiator.
• Precyse was named one of only a few vendors offering an end‐to‐end solution for service, technology and scalability.
Graham Triggs, KLAS director of financial and services research and author of the MTSO report said, “Today, most vendors’ performance scores are at their highest ever. Even so, the market is in transition. Vendors are clearly moving towards taking ownership of more of the entire transcription, technology, and service relationship with providers.”
KLAS is an independent‐research company that conducts surveys of healthcare executives and
professionals within the hospital and physician client base of each MTSO. The resulting performancerankings reflect the aggregated opinions of customers, comparing MTSO performance against participant objectives and expectations.
“It is gratifying that our clients have noticed and appreciated the qualities that set us apart in the industry,” says Sharon Fremer, Precyse’s Vice President of Transcription Solutions.“We’re particularly pleased that 100 percent of our surveyed clients said Precyse keeps its promises and they would continue to do business with us. We attribute our high KLAS ranking to a combination of our experienced, dedicated and well-trained staff, our proven, trusted technologies and the active participation of our loyal clients in the KLAS survey, who are always helping us improve.”
CEO and Founder of Precyse Jeffrey Levitt adds, “The results of the KLAS report clearly indicate that Precyse continues to dominate the top of the pack of transcription service providers. But dictation and transcription is only the starting point for our enterprise clinical documentation software platform. By successfully capturing, digitizing and tagging our clinical data and importing this data into an electronic medical record as structured and tagged text, we are confident that we will add great value to our clients through our automated coding, clinical documentation improvement and clinical decision support tools and services. We are committed to capitalizing on our innovative technologies, excellent performance and extraordinary customer service to remain a leader not only in transcription services, but in all of our business lines.”
Coloplast Selects TrackWise® Solution for Enhanced Customer Complaint Reporting
Holmdel, NJ Dec 16, 2010 – Sparta Systems, Inc., the maker of TrackWise quality management software and the market leader in enterprise quality and compliance management solutions, today announced that Coloplast, the leading global supplier of intimate healthcare products, has selected Sparta’s TrackWise Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to replace its customer complaint handling system.
Coloplast’s decision to phase out its existing Lotus Notes-based system was made following an extensive review of the needs of the business by a joint team from Coloplast and Sparta Systems. Additionally, Coloplast conducted an extensive review of the complaint handling products and solutions being used by leading medical equipment manufactures and life sciences companies, determining that the TrackWise solution possessed the industry-wide reputation for ease-of-use, configurability and ability to integrate with existing applications that would meet and exceed Coloplast’s demanding requirements.
“TrackWise software appears to be very straightforward to use,” said Per Larsen, IT project manager at Coloplast.” There should be a minimal learning curve for our complaints management teams and, therefore, we expect the resulting increase in efficiency to be immediate. The software platform is also extremely flexible and will integrate easily into our existing network and applications set-up.”
Coloplast will transfer its existing complaint management process to the TrackWise platform. Once fully deployed, almost 300 of the company’s customer care consultants will rely on the TrackWise solution for the logging and resolution of user complaints. The second stage will be to move validation documentation management and all controlled workflows into the TrackWise EQMS.
“At Coloplast we have a strong track record within quality and complaint handling, but we want to be even better,” said Larsen. “Efficient complaint management is a must-have. If a manufacturer is not able to show the handling of complaints properly it could lose its license to operate. The management, handling and rectification of a complaint is the first port of call for an auditor.”
Moving forward, Coloplast plans to migrate all of its quality management processes into the TrackWise platform, linking the company’s 30-office network to a centralized quality management software platform. Once completed, it is expected that TrackWise software will be used to monitor the quality management of all processes along the supply chain, from supplier contracts through to change management.
“Every department within Coloplast is audited at least once a year by an external party, more so if there is a quality complaint made,” said Yaniv Vardi, managing director, Sparta Systems Europe. “This is a major administrative task and one that leaves no margin for error. TrackWise software makes the compilation of the customer complaint reports simple, ensuring that all the required data is logged and reported when the auditors come calling.”
For more information, visit www.spartasystems.com.
About Coloplast
Coloplast develops products and services that make life easier for people with very personal and private medical conditions. Working closely with the people who use our products, we create solutions that are sensitive to their special needs. We call this intimate healthcare. Our business includes ostomy care, urology and continence care and wound and skin care. We operate globally and employ more than 7,000 people.
About Sparta Systems
Sparta Systems, Inc. is the industry leader for global quality and compliance management systems. Its TrackWise product is a web-based software application used by quality, manufacturing, and regulatory affairs professionals to manage quality and compliance issues across the enterprise. The company has more than 14 years of experience and an extensive customer base in the life sciences and other highly regulated industries. Sparta Systems offers its customers a complete solution for global quality management needs, including the onsite support required throughout the project lifecycle. More information about Sparta Systems and TrackWise® can be found at www.spartasystems.com.
Sparta Systems Appoints Vice President of North American Sales
Holmdel, NJ Dec 1, 2010 – Sparta Systems, Inc., the maker of TrackWise® quality management software and the market leader in enterprise quality and compliance management solutions, today announced that Jason Reynolds, a 20-year software and life science industry veteran, has been named vice president of North American sales. In this role, Reynolds will oversee all of Sparta Systems’ sales activities across the region, helping global organizations leverage the company’s market-leading TrackWise enterprise quality management solution (EQMS) to improve their quality and compliance initiatives.
Prior to joining Sparta, Reynolds served as vice president of North American sales at Phase Forward, a provider of integrated data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety, where he successfully contributed to the company’s growth and completion of its initial public offering in 2004. Before this, he served in multiple sales positions at Interneuron Pharmaceuticals and G.D. Searle & Company, where he continually exceeded company sales goals. He received a bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University.
“Jason possesses exactly the right combination of sales and industry expertise to guide our North American sales efforts,” said James E. McGowan, CEO, Sparta Systems. “His unique experience in both the life sciences and software industries will prove to be invaluable as we extend Sparta’s leadership in providing unparalleled quality and compliance management solutions to organizations in highly regulated industries. “
“I’m excited to join a company that has an impressive history of delivering innovative, market-leading solutions,” said Reynolds. “Sparta Systems is well positioned to address the growing quality and compliance needs that organizations in highly regulated industries face, and I look forward to working with the team to continue the company’s strong momentum.”