Modular Certification Helps Hospitals Achieve MU Compliance

HMS is currently working toward receiving Modular Certification (Public Health Surveillance) for its Mergence platform.  The key to this certification is the utilization of HMS’ Mergence data integration engine. Mergence is a service provided to a medical facility—and has been fine-tuned by HMS to meet client needs.

This will assist hospitals in achieving Meaningful Use Compliance—without requiring facilities to change their current EpiCenter data feeds. Data from Mergence is sent in certified, secure format to HMS’ EpiCenter system.

“Providing this service affirms our commitment to customer service,” states Kevin Hutchison, HMS President and CEO. “It ensures that current—and future—users of the system continue to gain valuable insight and support regarding important issues that impact public health.”

Mergence may be a familiar term to some Public Health professionals. It was the first open source integration engine to work with HL7 and general XML data types. While the first generation of Mergence was open source, today’s Mergence has been updated to better address clients’ needs.  Mergence is suitable to a variety of tasks that most HL7 integration engines simply cannot accomplish. 

HMS will be able to route incoming data feeds through the Mergence engine, which will then output a data stream in the required HL7 format. The data stream will end at EpiCenter—meeting the Meaningful Use stage 2 requirements and implementation specifications related to the submission of Syndromic Surveillance data to public health departments.