Happy National Physical Therapy Month!
At Cedaron, we’re taking special joy in this celebration because we get to assist the nation’s movement specialists with their work every day and assure the viability of their profession for decades to come.
Not only have hospitals and private practices around the nation selected our CONNECT electronic medical record to document the quality of their patient care, but our team also is integrally involved in supporting the American Physical Therapy Association in developing its Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry.Â
This robust database will allow PT’s everywhere to show that their treatments offer results on par with or better than chiropractors, orthopedic surgeons or prescription drugs.
Such a system may seem like a pipe dream now, but Cedaron has been helping cardiologists and thoracic surgeons do this work since 1998 when the Society of Thoracic Surgeons had the foresight to establish registries to measure outcomes for various treatments that their patients received.
Physical therapists can benefit from some of the lessons learned from these two professions.
Back in 1998, mortality rates for cardiac surgery stood at close to 7 percent. Today, that figure is less than 3 percent because standards for care were driven by data analysis on millions of patient outcomes. The thoracic surgeon’s national registry is now an essential industry resource.
Cedaron’s leaders envisaged this database’s potential and created a suite of software products — CardiacCare & Cento Analytics — to allow medical providers to instantaneously compare their patient data to specifications from the thoracic surgeon’s registry and quickly adjust treatment to prevent or quash a spike in complications. If, for instance, there’s a sudden surge in the number of patients having complications, our software can help medical providers assess what’s causing it.
Ours is the leading certified software solution to easily track this data and analyze what all those numbers mean. In fact, we were so successful that nine major cardiovascular information companies — ASCEND, AGFA, Cerner, Digisonics Fuji, McKesson, Merge, Philips, and ScImage — chose Cedaron’s CardiacCare & Cento Analytics as their preferred registry vendor.
Just as we deduced 20 years ago that it was time for Cedaron to lead the way in data mining in the field of cardic care, we can see that it is time for us to move on collaborating with the APTA to ensure that its Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry becomes the industry’s pre-eminent database.Â
There is strength in these numbers, and that will become more apparent to physical therapists in 2019 when PT’s begin participating in Medicare’s Merit-based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS.Â
Payments then will be based on evidence and quality data. That is why PT’s must begin now to collect and share information, establish standards of care and perfect the technology.
Cedaron’s CONNECT software will put PT organizations everywhere ahead of the game. In a blog post tomorrow, we’ll share data and features that reveal the simplicity, power and effectiveness of our product.
Today, we just want to bask in the knowledge that Cedaron CONNECT plays a critical role in helping physical therapists to help their patients win.Â
Cedaron. Calm the storm.
