"Welcome to our company blog. Within these blog posts, we hope to share our insights on clinical quality management, the patient-centered medical home, chronic disease management in primary care, evidence-based medicine, and the use of technology in ambulatory care settings."

- David Morin, CEO and Donald Nease Jr., MD, Chief Medical Officer

To expand the reach of our registry into all areas of clinical care, I'm pleased to announce our latest partnership with MyCareTeam. MyCareTeam is a Massachusetts-based company that has a wonderful, proven diabetes management product. Their product, MCT-Diabetes, allows patients to download data from their home glucose monitoring device into their web-based diabetes management tool. This web-based management tool then helps patients monitor their glucose, look at trends and build up a health record. This health record can be shared with care providers or uploaded to Google Health. Our partnership will allow MCT-Diabetes to download this information right into a patient record in Cielo Clinic. So, a diabetic patient monitoring their glucose could, through MCT-Diabetes, send their information to their provider and this information would be seamlessly inserted into the patient's Cielo Clinic electronic health record. Our population management tools and decision support engine can then make use of this data to help with management. Great stuff for a Medical Home. Dave Morin CEO and Co-Founder Cielo MedSolutions

Today we announced something that we think is quite unique. Many providers tell us that their electronic medical record system (EMR) or physician portal doesn't provide the chronic disease management functionality of Cielo Clinic and ask if we could "embed" Cielo Clinic into their existing technology solution to make it even more powerful. Well, now we can! Cielo Clinic now provides an embeddable web service. For you non-techies, here's what this means: Cielo Clinic's clinical decision support functionality can be integrated directly into another health IT application. (In other words, Cielo Clinic can run inside another application). This allows you to get evidence-based guideline clinical care reminders right inside your electronic medical record or physicial portal system. No need to utilize two separate applications to get care reminders! We've already begun work with our first EMR vendor that wants to integrate our technology and have many more we are talking with. This is pretty unique stuff and we think it is important. As we've said in the past, our goal is to make technology fit into your workflow and this certainly helps in that regard. If you'd like to talk about how this can integrate into your EMR or physician portal, just give us a call or e-mail! Dave Morin CEO Cielo MedSolutions LLC

If you are evaluating or researching the technology underpinnings of a medical home, you should take a look at wonderful piece (available on the internet) called "Health IT to Support the Patient-Centered Medical Home" authored by Michael Klinkman and Robert Phillips. This slide show accompanied recent testimony they gave to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. It's probably different than many of the other presentations you've seen on this topic, but what they have to say is very powerful. Dave Morin CEO Cielo MedSolutions Disclosure: Michael Klinkman is on the Medical Advisory Board of Cielo MedSolutions.

Data is data, right? Facts and figures presented in some manner. More data is always better than less? Larger reports must always tell you more? Many a job has been justified on generating data. There are many to which generating data is the end-goal. Each of us is drowning in data. And much of it really doesn't help you do what you do better. Shouldn't that be the point of getting data? Actionable data is data that you can do something with. It answers not just "what" but "why". An example: your clinical system generates a report that says your compliance rate with a guideline for measuring A1C levels every six months for diabetics is 50%. That tells you, for half your diabetic patients, you are meeting the goals of the guideline. Cool! Now, you want to get that compliance rate to 60%. What do you do? All the report tells you is that 50% are in compliance. You have no idea what's going on with the other 50%, you don't even know who they are. Good luck getting your compliance rate higher. Here comes the need for actionable data! The data you need to get your compliance rate higher includes: 1. A list of the patients not in compliance. Yep, this certainly is where you'd start, but this alone doesn't tell you why they are not in compliance. And, it needs to be all the patients not in compliance, even those you haven't seen in years. 2. Details as to why they are not complaint (like: have never been seen, have a lab req but never completed it, refused to do it, have not been asked to do it). Cool. Now we know what to do for each patient. How do we take action to move forward? 3. Contact information for each of these patients. Use this info for telephone calls, custom letters, emails, text messages, smoke signals, whatever it takes to reach these non-compliant patients and move them to compliance (Note: Cielo Clinic can generate letters and create call lists but cannot yet generate smoke signals). And, because you know the exact reason each patient is not in compliance, you can have directed communication with them to get to their exact needs. 4. Details on the actions you take. Track the fact you made calls, sent letters, got more lab reqs out, etc… So, as you continue to work with these patients, you know exactly what you've done to be smarter about it next time around. Got actionable data? Dave Morin CEO Cielo MedSolutions

I found Dr. Don Nease's recently posted article on the potential of EMRs to impact prevention and early detection quite informative. We agree that there is great value in an EMR, but also agree with Dr. Nease's views as our customers and prospects come to us talking about the gaps in functionality in areas of prevention, screening and chronic disease management. Cielo Clinic fills that gap and works alongside your EMR, bringing better overall value to your entire health information technology investments. Read at: http://www.preventcancer.org/iDialogue/ Dave Morin CEO Cielo MedSolutions