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EMA Recognized by Information Week Magazine for Bio-Terror Data

Date: May 28, 2003

For Immediate Release

Information Week Magazine Recognizes Emergency Medical Associates for Bio-terror Data

(Livingston, NJ) Information Week magazine, long considered the source for senior level IT professionals across all industry sectors, has recognized Emergency Medical Associates for its bio-terror data capabilities. EMA’s Emergency Medicine Analysis & Reporting System (eMars), a business intelligence solution serving as a data warehouse for over 4 million patient encounters, is able to provide historical patient data to the New York State Department of Health. This data is culled from patients who visit Emergency Department’s of 16 area hospitals, all of whom are EMA clients.

eMars can provide “syndromic” information – symptoms that patients present when visiting emergency departments. Having this data and analysis can assist in the detection of a bio-terrorism attack and help local, state and federal officials in the event of an infectious disease breakout.

The text of the Information Week article follows below. For more information about EMA, their physician services and clinical information systems, please contact Lee Haberman at 877.692.4665 or visit EMA at www.ema-nj.com.

HISTORICAL MEDICAL DATA'S MODERN VALUE

New Jersey Company's Medical Data Could Help Reveal Bio-terror Attack or Disease Outbreak

By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Emergency Medical Associates is an Emergency Physician Group with more than 190 board-certified emergency physicians who staff the emergency rooms at 16 hospitals in the New York City area. And while the company's No. 1 mission is providing bedside emergency care, its use of data warehousing and data analysis might one day help health officials in New York and New Jersey detect a bio-terrorism attack or the breakout of an infectious disease like severe acute respiratory syndrome.

While many physician groups in the United States are just beginning to roll out electronic patient record systems, EMA has been electronically collecting patient data for years. EMA in 1988 developed its first Emergency Department Information Manager system, which included patient tracking and electronic medical chart software. Over the years, the company added physician-billing software and developed an Oracle-based data warehouse called Emergency Medicine Analysis & Reporting System, or eMARs.

The company also uses business-intelligence tools from Business Objects SA to provide monthly reports to hospital administrators and EMA doctors analyzing nitty-gritty details such as how long emergency room patients with heart problems had to wait for treatment and how long after treatment were they discharged.

EMA is in talks with state and city health departments about providing historical data that might help officials detect a bio-terrorist attack, SARS, or other possible public health emergencies. Having the ability to analyze historical data from the more than 600,000 patients that EMA physicians treat each year in hospital emergency departments in northern New Jersey and Westchester County, New York, might help health officials spot trouble.

New York public health departments currently gather "syndromic" information from New York-area hospitals--the symptoms that patients present when they seek treatment in an emergency room.

For instance, EMA's data could help determine if the number of ER patients complaining of gastrointestinal problems is unusually high and if it's consistent with rotavirus gastro infection outbreaks in past seasons, according to Jonathan Rothman, EMA's Director of Data Management. "We're working on projects with the state and city health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use our data for those surveillance purposes."