Children's Hospital Association Selects Clinical Architecture's Symedical(R) for Global Terminology Management and Data Normalization

CARMEL, IN--(Marketwired - April 24, 2015) - The Children's Hospital Association (CHA) has selected Clinical Architecture's Symedical for global terminology management to enhance its members' abilities to compare data for the purposes of improving care and services across all children's hospitals and to support the mission of improving child health. CHA develops solutions and champions public policies that enable hospitals to better serve children. It is the premier resource for pediatric data and analytics, driving the improved clinical and operational performance of its member hospitals.

Symedical is a comprehensive software solution that enables healthcare organizations to centrally manage the acquisition, maintenance, normalization and distribution of healthcare terminologies. CHA is using Symedical to map a variety of inbound data domains to both standard and custom terminologies. Symedical's embedded intelligence and sophisticated algorithms have allowed CHA to achieve auto mapping rates far greater than historical efforts, improving the efficiency and accuracy of the normalization process. The need for custom ETL work has also been eliminated through the use of Symedical's built-in runtime services that automate the distribution of map results.

"Aggregating and normalizing data across multiple hospitals is core to our business model," said Richard Stepanek, Children's Hospital Association's chief information officer. "With Symedical, we are able to streamline the terminology management process and improve accuracy of the classification results. In turn, we increase the frequency and quality of analytics that our member hospitals depend on." 

The mapping interface provides tools to easily evaluate candidate terms when an exact match is not found and consults other mappings within the domain to ensure consistent results. And, Symedical's Waypoint module provides a secure interface for member hospitals to interact and provide feedback.

"With the increasing amount of information being gathered electronically, it can be a challenge to combine and analyze important data in a timely, consistent and accurate way," said Shaun Shakib, Chief Informatics Officer at Clinical Architecture. "We are excited to be working with an innovative organization like CHA to increase the efficiency and accuracy of data analysis in support of their mission of improving child health."

About Children's Hospital Association
The Children's Hospital Association (CHA) is the national voice of more than 200 children's hospitals, advancing child health through innovation in the quality, cost and delivery of care. For more information on CHA, visit www.childrenshospitals.org.

About Clinical Architecture
Clinical Architecture is the leading innovator in healthcare terminology management technology. While healthcare market forces and regulatory requirements have elevated the importance of managing information as coded data, or terminology traditional tools and methods have not evolved to meet the challenge. Clinical Architecture is moving healthcare forward by providing innovative software solutions for managing the complexities of healthcare terminologies. Informative discussions on a variety of health information technology topics are available at the company's Healthcare IT Blog. For more information, please visit www.ClinicalArchitecture.com. Symedical is a registered trademark of Clinical Architecture, LLC.