Anakam Highlighted In $16.1M HEALTHeLINK Beacon Community Initiative
Anakam, Inc. announces that HEALTHeLINK, the Western New York Clinical Information Exchange, based in Buffalo, NY, recently included the Anakam Identity Suite as part of a demonstration of their $16.1M Beacon Community Initiative funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fight diabetes in Western New York. Attendees included David Blumenthal M.D., MPP, who serves as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Department of HHS, Representative Brian Higgins from New York's 27th congressional district and Richard Daines, M.D., the New York State Health Commissioner.
The Beacon Community Program was created to help communities use health information technology to forge cooperation and use resources effectively toward local priority health goals. HEALTHeLINK has received the largest Beacon Community Award in the United States from the Department of HHS. As a Beacon Community award winner, HEALTHeLINK is dedicated to improving patient care outcomes and demonstrating cost savings in their clinical practices. HEALTHeLINK implemented the Anakam Identity Suite in their clinical information exchange to provide a cost-effective mechanism for strong authentication and more secure online transactions for physicians accessing the private information of patients.
HEALTHeLINK unveiled its plan to combat the high incidences of diabetes in the Western New York community with a special event that included a demonstration of the HEALTHeLINK's community wide Two-Factor Authentication solution. The Anakam solution enables secure access to HEALTHeLINK for care providers in the community in addition to secure access to other care providers and health insurance plans through a single platform – simplifying the physician's experience. According to Dan Porreca, Executive Director of HEALTHeLINK, "Our vision is to create real-time, electronic sharing of clinical information among health care professionals in order to promote collaboration, control healthcare costs, and improve the delivery of services, clinical outcomes and patient safety. Having the confidence of Anakam's trusted access allows us to further that vision by ensuring secure remote access to confidential health information and enhancing patient care and provider workflow."
Anakam is proud to be a technology partner to HEALTHeLINK in this important endeavor. The Anakam Identity Suite will enable HEALTHeLINK participants to obtain patient information they need, securely and legitimately, without slowing them down as they do their real work of improving their patients' health. This unprecedented level of collaboration between physicians, health plans and hospitals to improve the quality of health care in the community is the ultimate goal of the HEALTHeLINK Beacon Community project. Trusted access in this process improves patient and provider adoption rates and usage. In addition, ensures complete clinical data and improved patient outcomes.
"Anakam is uniquely able to support secure remote access to such critical healthcare systems in ways that are flexible, scalable, and cost-effective enough to satisfy the distinctive demands of the healthcare market," said Dr. Bill Braithwaite, Anakam's Chief Medical Officer and contributing author of HIPAA. "Enabling remote access that meets the highest security standards without disrupting provider workflow is key to this success."
About Anakam
Anakam is a global leader in multi-factor authentication, identity proofing and user verification technologies. The Anakam Identity Suite enables cost-effective strong authentication and identity management across an entire enterprise – customers, business partners, and employees. With tens of millions of end users, and software that deploys inside the enterprise or in the cloud, the Anakam Identity Suite is unique in the industry, providing progressive multi-channel capabilities that enable secure, trusted eBusiness to very large user-communities in a single platform. The suite includes two-factor authentication, remote identity proofing and verification, professional credentialing, and secure collaboration. For more information, visit http://www.anakam.com.
About HEALTHeLINK
HEALTHeLINK, the Western New York Clinical Information Exchange, is a collaborative effort among various organizations to share clinical information in efficient and meaningful ways to improve the delivery of care, enhance clinical outcomes, and help control healthcare costs throughout the region. The not-for-profit organization was established through funding from The Catholic Health System, Erie County Medical Center Corporation, HealthNow New York (BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York), Independent Health Association, Kaleida Health, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Univera Healthcare and the Health Care Efficiency and Affordability Law for New Yorkers Capital Grant Program (HEAL NY) from New York State. HEALTHeLINK also received the country's largest grant as part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program. HEALTHeLINK stakeholders include a broad representation of healthcare professionals and organizations throughout the eight-county Western New York region such as the Buffalo Academy of Medicine (BAM), Erie County Department of Health (ECDOH), State University of New York at Buffalo and the WNY R-AHEC (Rural Area Health Education Center.) For more information visit http://www.wnyhealthelink.com.
About the Beacon Community Program
The $235M Beacon Community Program was created last year under the Health Information Technology Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted last year by Congress and President Obama, as part of a battery of new activities to support the nation's transition from paper-based medical records to electronic health records (EHR). A total of 17 selected Beacon communities will pioneer the use of health information technology tools to focus community-wide efforts on specific health targets that are the most important for each community. Beacon communities will also provide learning and lessons for other communities as they adopt and employ health information technology. For more information visit http://healthit.hhs.gov.
SOURCE: Anakam, Inc.