According to the Wall Street Journal, Medem and Cerner will announce a move to merge their EMR and Physician/Patient communications networks to provide views of both in-patient and outpatient encounters in a single system.
The deal will integrate both companies' networks, providing doctors access to patients' records from visits to hospitals, which are known as in-patient facilities, and private offices, or out-patient facilities. These records will reside on one database, saving doctors from having to fax them from one office to the next or physically retrieve paper copies. To protect patients' privacy, access to their records will be restricted to their doctors. For further protection, every time a file is accessed by a doctor, it leaves a digital fingerprint indicating who accessed the records and when.
It sounds to me like this will help Medem a lot more than Cerner as it gets Medem's physician/patient communications tools in front of a lot more docs.
As an aside, you always have to worry about the depth of knowledge present when a reporter makes a statement like this:
What Medem and Cerner are doing for medical databases is similar to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, which unites the various software programs running on a personal computer.
Um,....huh? C'mon WSJ, you've got to be able to to better than this. (full story available here, but requires WSJ subscription)
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