HEALTHCARE and ACCESSIBILITY

In collaboration with its clients and partners, ATI is developing and deploying technology to both enhance the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare, while improving information accessibility for the healthcare community.

Providing Technology to Improve Care in Rural and Underserved Communities

ATI is validating the effectiveness of an Intelligent Care Manager application and telehealth to improve quality of care for chronic disease. The Intelligent Care Manager is a web-based application to enhance care team coordination and adherence to best clinical practices while it provides an “automated personal trainer” to help the patient more effectively manage chronic disease.

Delivering technology that enhances information accessibility for people with disabilities and healthcare professionals Using proven methods, processes, and industry-wide involvement to develop healthcare information exchange standards

To integrate the Intelligent Care Manager with existing systems, a standards-based interface extracts data from a Community Health Center patient registry and populates either Electronic Health Records or a medical management system.

IT Accessibility for People with Disabilities

ATI and New Vectors are working with the General Services Administration (GSA) to enhance their ability to provide federal agencies with technical assistance for compliance with federal acquisition requirements on accessibility. This long-term effort is capitalizing on the team’s unique federal acquisition and accessibility knowledge and expertise to develop and deploy tools to help assure that any electronics and information technology a federal agency acquires is accessible to people with disabilities. These web-based, intelligent tools (collectively called the Buy Accessible System) also allow product and service vendors to describe how their offerings conform to federal standards for accessibility. When vendors use the Buy Accessible System, they provide the information in a form that is then made available through that same system to federal agencies as they assess acquisition alternatives.

Enabling Effective Health Information Sharing While U.S. healthcare is highly regarded globally, it faces significant challenges. Healthcare in this nation costs 50 percent more than in any other industrialized country; medical errors cause serious complications and deaths; and less than 65 percent of patients receive critical recommended care. Information technology has the promise to improve the cost, quality, and safety of healthcare. To meet that promise, it must be possible to effectively share healthcare information electronically across diverse information systems and organizations. A well-defined approach to harmonize the many standards available to the healthcare community is critical to make information sharing possible. Harmonization is the mission of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, which is the collaboration between ATI, the American National Standards Institute, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Booz-Allen-Hamilton, and many other stakeholders from technology and healthcare fields. The collaboration is developing guidelines for the use of existing standards to enable effective sharing of healthcare information. Broad industry involvement provides the diverse perspectives needed to assure wide-ranging applicability, and will provide a distributed testbed for real-world deployment.