Newsbytes

The companies will be merged under the Gestalt Diagnostics name and brand.

Gestalt Diagnostics, 509-755-9433

CommonWell Health Alliance launches connectivity program

The nonprofit CommonWell Health Alliance has announced a new option for connecting health information technology vendors and health care practitioners to its nationwide interoperability network.

The alliance has developed the CommonWell Connector program, which allows CommonWell members that provide integration platforms and services to offer CommonWell services to their customers, including health care provider organizations and electronic health record system and other IT vendors.

“With this new option, organizations interested in connecting to CommonWell, such as EHRs, can dramatically reduce the development effort required to connect to the CommonWell network and enable their clients to participate in and derive value from this data sharing,” said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance, in a press statement.

Health information technology vendors that link to CommonWell via the Connector program will not be required to join the alliance or to certify their products on the CommonWell network. The member organization serving as the CommonWell Connector, which has a certified CommonWell Connected product, will act as the intermediary for the connection.

CommonWell Connectors can promote CommonWell services and network connectivity as part of their client offerings.

Proscia introduces digital pathology system for commercial research

Proscia has released a new edition of Concentriq, the company’s flagship digital pathology platform.

The new Concentriq Commercial Research Edition is a comprehensive image-management solution designed to help life sciences organizations more readily incorporate pathology data into research, discovery, and clinical trials.

This latest edition seamlessly integrates with leading laboratory information systems, scanners, clinical trial management systems, and image-analysis solutions. Other features include highly configurable hierarchical image and data management; split-screen viewing and navigation of multiple images in the same window, including fluorescent and brightfield images; and tissue microarray management, which automates the segmentation of whole TMA images into individual core images, with same-core and multiple stain viewing simultaneously.

The system supports collaboration among departments, geographies, and organizations and controls data access with configurable role- and user-based permissions. It can be deployed in the cloud, on the premises, or as hybrid configurations.

“Having a comprehensive digital pathology solution specifically designed for the needs of scientists and pathologists allows them to focus on research and discovery instead of wasting valuable time on tedious image management and data gathering,” said Nathan Buchbinder, chief product officer for Proscia, in a company press release.

The Concentriq digital pathology platform also includes the Concentriq Clinical Enterprise Edition and Concentriq Academic Research and Education Edition. Concentriq is not intended for use in primary diagnosis.

Proscia, 877-255-1341

HL7 releases clinical genomics use cases

The standards development organization Health Level Seven International has published “HL7 Domain Analysis Model: Clinical Genomics,” a series of use cases suited to clinical settings.

“The document is part of an ongoing effort by the HL7 Clinical Genomics Work Group to identify common workflows and use cases to facilitate scalable and interoperable data standards for the breadth of clinical genomics scenarios,” according to an HL7 International blog post. The model offers use cases in a variety of areas, including preimplantation genetic diagnosis, whole exome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and proteomics.

“The ‘Domain Analysis Model: Clinical Genomics’ builds on the DAM clinical sequencing work that is already being used to design precision medicine workflows at hospitals across the country,” said Gil Alterovitz, PhD, HL7 Clinical Genomics Work Group co-chair and director of the Biomedical Cybernetics Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, in the blog post.

The DAM document provides narrative context and workflow diagrams to guide users through each stage of the use cases and describes steps involving the various stakeholders, including laboratorians, geneticists, clinicians, and patients. “This contextual knowledge aids in the development and implementation of software designed to interpret and communicate the relevant results in a clinical computer system, especially a patient’s electronic health record,” according to the blog.

HL7 will explore additional use cases based on stakeholder input and other feedback.

Dr. Aller teaches informatics in the Department of Pathology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He can be reached at raller@usc.edu. Hal Weiner is president of Weiner Consulting Services LLC, Eugene, Ore. He can be reached at hal@weinerconsulting.com.