April 19, 2017 — Siemens Healthineers plans to expand its Population Health Management (PHM) portfolio with the acquisition of Medicalis Corp. based in San Francisco and Kitchener, Ontario. Medicalis is a leading provider of clinical decision support (CDS) solutions at the point of order entry, imaging workflow (IW) management and referral management (RM).
By incorporating these offerings into its PHM portfolio, Siemens Healthineers will enable healthcare providers to effectively bridge between PHM at the health system level and at the departmental level.
The newly-acquired Population Health Management portfolio will extend the Siemens Healthineers strategy for Value-Based Healthcare across the health system enterprise and hospital departmental levels:
- Clinical decision support (CDS) provides the mechanism, as defined under the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 (PAMA), to check appropriateness of imaging orders and enables healthcare providers to define and evolve their standard of care, according to their appropriate use criteria (AUC), based on evidence and best practice. Today, 20–30 percent of high-tech imaging procedures fail to provide information that improves patient welfare and, therefore, may represent, at least in part, unnecessary imaging services;
- Imaging workflow orchestrates the interpreting physician desktop, streamlining workflow, and standardization of diagnostic pathways for high-impact disease states. It ensures the right specialist, the right tools, a timely read and prevention of care gaps; and
- Referral management helps to avoid breaks in care by providing simple appointment scheduling tools, which help a patient schedule examinations in their network. This avoids leakage of patient information to another health system, which breaks communication and causes lost revenue.
In the short term, the solutions developed by Medicalis are expected to address the immediate need for consolidating providers to orchestrate and standardize their imaging workflow and to achieve compliance with PAMA, expected to become effective on Jan. 1, 2018, which mandates consultation of appropriateness CDS at the point of order for certain advanced imaging tests. Siemens Healthineers believes these solutions will enable providers to achieve PAMA compliance while retaining control over the content, allowing them to move beyond simple compliance toward truly establishing an evolving standard of care based on evidence and direct health system experience.
The solutions developed by Medicalis allow networks of hospitals (health systems/integrated delivery networks) to improve physician productivity, manage patient referrals, and scheduling to enhance the relationship with the patient and ensure clinically appropriate imaging and tests to reduce inappropriate utilization.
The acquisition agreement was signed in April 2017. Terms of the transaction are not disclosed. The closing of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.
For more information: www.usa.healthcare.siemens.com
July 26, 2024 
