St. Joseph Health Selects Clinical Architecture's Symedical(R) for Semantic Normalization and Interoperability

CARMEL, IN--(Marketwired - January 29, 2015) - Clinical Architecture, the leader in terminology management technology, announced that St. Joseph Health, an integrated healthcare delivery system serving patients in California, Texas and New Mexico, has selected Symedical for system-wide terminology management, semantic normalization and interoperability. St. Joseph Health will use Symedical to automate the maintenance of standard vocabularies and the mapping of local and free text terms; allowing them to efficiently normalize disparate data and remove redundancy in the system's provider and patient portal.

As a large integrated delivery network serving populations in three states, St. Joseph Health manages health information from a broad spectrum of sources. In addition to the complexities of working with data from disparate clinical applications, redundant information about a patient can also be reported from multiple venues of care. In order to make this combined data meaningful for providers, St. Joseph Health will normalize information to a common semantic meaning and reconcile redundant information into a single entry.

"Our physicians expect and deserve the information we aggregate from internal and external sources to be an accurate and complete representation of their patient's medical history, presented in a concise, actionable format," said Bill Russell, St. Joseph Health Chief Information Officer. "To accomplish that objective, we needed an efficient way to normalize data from multiple systems and remove redundant information. Symedical's terminology tooling and runtime services allow our staff to rapidly meet and maintain this standard going forward."

"Leveraging clinical patient information across venues of care is key to discovering trends, improving outcomes and enhancing the patient's experience," said Charlie Harp, Chief Executive Officer of Clinical Architecture. "We built our Symedical product to help unlock this potential. St. Joseph Health has the vision and drive to show what can be done when you turn data into knowledge and we are excited to be a part of this effort."

About St. Joseph Health
St. Joseph Health (SJH) is a $5.5 billion not-for-profit integrated Catholic health care delivery system sponsored by the St. Joseph Health Ministry. SJH's comprehensive range of services includes 16 acute care hospitals, home health agencies, hospice care, outpatient services, skilled nursing facilities, community clinics and physician organizations throughout California, Texas, and New Mexico. Collectively, the 24,000 dedicated employees and 6,000 outstanding SJH physicians deliver care to more than 137,000 inpatients and 3.6 million outpatients each year. Throughout its comprehensive regions of care, SJH strives to provide perfect care while building the healthiest communities and ensuring every encounter is sacred. These extraordinary efforts have been recognized locally and nationally, including distinctions in US News & World Report and Magnet recognition. Guided by the traditions of its founders, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, SJH is committed to maintaining a continuum of care that matches the diverse needs of its communities. For more information, visit www.stjoe.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.