| Jack Bowie |
Apelon, Inc. |
VP,
Sales & Marketing |
jbowie@
apelon.com
|
(203)
431-2530 Opt. 1, ext. 150 |
| Sandy Cummings |
ARiA Marketing, Inc. |
Vice President |
scummings@
ariamarketing.com |
(617) 332-9999, ext. 210 |
HONG KONG HOSPITAL AUTHORITY SELECTS APELON
TERMINOLOGY SOLUTIONS
Terminology Components Will Facilitate Retrieval and Analysis
of Clinical Information
RIDGEFIELD, CT – March 9, 2004 – Apelon,
Inc., supplier of healthcare terminology solutions, has been selected
to provide terminology products and services to the Hong Kong Hospital
Authority (HA) in support of evidence-based decision-making.
The HA is responsible for the management of all public hospitals
in Hong Kong, encompassing the delivery of comprehensive secondary
and tertiary specialist care and medical rehabilitation. The HA manages
42 public hospitals, 47 specialty outpatient clinics, and 13 general
outpatient clinics, which from 2001 to 2002 saw a total of 1.2 million
inpatient and day patient discharges, 8.5 million outpatient encounters
and 2.6 million accident and emergency encounters.
In addition to direct care, the HA provides public health information
to the Hong Kong health providers and patient communities, and collaborates
with national and international healthcare agencies. Most notably,
the HA and its information systems played a critical role in the
identification and management of the recent SARS outbreak.
“For a number of years, different health professions have
been using a variety of vocabularies or codes to represent concepts
for their activities, thus posing potential barriers to information
access and sharing among healthcare systems,” said Grace Cheng,
head of HA’s Knowledge Management Unit. “Apelon’s
concept-based indexing and retrieval capabilities accompanied by
other infrastructure that we have built allow seamless processing
and linking of related concepts. Our objectives are to enable easy
navigation within our knowledge portal, targeted dissemination of
authoritative information and best evidence to our clinicians, and
processing of direct queries from our clinical systems to support
evidence-based decision-making at the point of care.”
The HA will use Apelon’s advanced Concept-Based Indexing and
Retrieval (CBIR) software to improve the accuracy and efficiency
of information retrieval in its e-Knowledge Gateway (eKG) project.
The eKG provides timely and appropriate sharing of comprehensive
medical information to health professionals, via both intranet and
Internet connections, throughout the Hong Kong healthcare community.
Also included in the agreement are Apelon’s international
terminology management and update services, which will ensure that
the HA has continuing access to the most up-to-date clinical vocabularies.
In addition, Apelon’s Distributed Terminology System (DTS)
vocabulary server software will assist with integration of standard
terminologies with the eKG and the HA’s other clinical systems.
“The Hong Kong Hospital Authority has a well-deserved international
reputation for excellence, and we are honored that they have selected
Apelon for this important role in their information infrastructure,” said
Apelon’s CEO Stephen Coady. “As we have seen, international
boundaries and significant distances can be inconsequential to the
rapid spread of new diseases — sobering evidence of the critical
need to rapidly and accurately share medical information throughout
the worldwide healthcare community.”
About Apelon
Apelon is the largest supplier of medical terminology solutions.
Organizations use Apelon software to improve the quality, comparability
and accessibility of clinical and biomedical information. Apelon
offers terminology development and maintenance software, run time
vocabulary servers, and components for concept-based indexing,
clinical guideline development, and code set management. Please
visit www.Apelon.com for additional information.
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Inc.
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Inc., 100 Danbury Road, Ridgefield, CT 06877
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