Nihon Kohden America Completes Successful Testing of HL7 Patient Monitoring Network Gateway at IHE Connectathon 2012

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Nihon Kohden America, a leader and innovator in enterprise monitoring solutions, today announced that its HL7 Patient Monitor Gateway achieved full pass validation during interoperability tests with other healthcare IT systems at the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon 2012, held in Chicago this January.

"This exciting achievement demonstrates our commitment to industry standards and our goal of minimizing cost, enhancing efficiency, eliminating barriers to interoperability and improving patient care for our customers," said Mike Dashefsky, vice president, Nihon Kohden America.

The Nihon Kohden HL7 Gateway was tested successfully for the following IHE profiles:

• PAM - Patient Administration Management — enabling applications to share accurate patient demographic data
• DEC - Device Enterprise Communication — enabling the communication of device data to enterprise applications, such as EMR's and charting systems
• CT - Time Client — ensuring synchronized, time accurate data, logs and audit trails

Successfully validating these profiles is important as they reflect the standard interface configuration Nihon Kohden deploys at most customer sites.

"Interoperability between disparate medical information systems and devices poses one of the biggest challenges to the exchange of health information and clinical documentation,” Dashefsky said. “With IHE conformance, we significantly minimize the time required to negotiate specifications, streamline implementations and testing, and generally create efficiencies that minimize cost for our customers."

Nihon Kohden's HL7 Gateway connects both bedside and wireless telemetry monitors to most hospital information systems, including, but not limited to, EPIC, McKesson, Allscripts, CPSI, Meditech and Siemens. It can receive and populate patient demographics into the monitors, ensuring accurate and timely patient data. The HL7 Gateway then transmits comprehensive vital sign, blood pressure and hemodynamic data to a hospital's EMR or charting system automatically, eliminating manual entry, while ensuring accuracy and efficiency.

About Nihon Kohden America, Patient Monitoring Division

Nihon Kohden America was founded in 1979 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Nihon Kohden Corporation, Japan (founded in 1951). Nihon Kohden is a market leader in patient monitoring, sleep assessment, neurology and cardiology instrumentation. Its products are distributed to hospitals, physician's practices, mobile services, and outpatient and surgery centers throughout North America. Its patient monitoring solutions span the continuum of care and include products for bedside, transport, central stations, telemetry and Defensive Monitoring. Frost & Sullivan recognized Nihon Kohden's innovative technology with its 2008 North American Hospital Wireless Patient Monitoring Product Innovation Award. Find more information about Nihon Kohden http://www.nkusa.com/monitoring.