FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS – GENERAL
What is Medical Professor™?
Medical Professor is an emergency medicine and urgent care documentation application that facilitates documenting within any EHR. Medical Professor was developed by emergency physicians and advanced practitioners to improve speed, workflow, decision support, error reduction and safety, medical-legal protection, etc.
The Sullivan Group (TSG) has worked in partnership with Medical Professor to develop the application to maximize patient safety and risk management.
Comprehensive Professional Reimbursement, Inc. (CPR) has worked in partnership with Medical Professor to develop the application to maximize reimbursement potential while minimizing risk of noncompliance.
How does Medical Professor™ function within an EHR?
Medical Professor is built to live inside any EHR system, replacing the existing cumbersome documentation interface. The application leverages the existing strengths of EHR systems (CPOE, universal patient record, etc.) without interfering with system structure and workflow.
How does Medical Professor™ connect to an EHR?
Medical Professor leverages an advanced, precise connection to the EHR using RESTful APIs. This exchange of data is widely used by many other industries, such as banking and finance, and is now being adopted more readily in healthcare as well. In short, it is a safer, less expensive and easier way to connect to the underlying EHR system instead of building and managing complex HL-7 interfaces.
Medical Professor is a SMART application using the FHIR protocol to communicate with the underlying EHR system.
Medical Professor can connect to Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth and other EHR systems via Sansoro Health’s RESTful API platform, called Emissary. Sansoro has many Epic and Cerner clients on their Emissary platform, and we are happy to coordinate a discussion between your IT leadership and Sansoro about their platform and API set.
Medical Professor’s implementation team works side by side with you to complete limited installation and setup steps.
Is Medical Professor™ currently live in any Epic facilities?
Yes, Medical Professor is live in an Epic facility.
Is Medical Professor™ currently live in any Cerner facilities?
Medical Professor is in the process of contracting with several Cerner facilities; it is likely we will be live in one of those facilities in the next several months.
Where do Medical Professor™ Resources / RSQ Assist come from and how often is the content updated?
Medical Professor Resources / RSQ Assist (RSQ = Risk, Safety & Quality) is designed to provide practitioners with clinical reminders and decision support when they need it — at the point of care, during the patient encounter.
Examples of Medical Professor Resources / RSQ Assist content include anatomical graphic illustrations, illustrated procedures, medical categorization and classification systems, clinical algorithms, clinical calculators, evidence-based guidelines (when available) and Quick Consults™.
This information is derived from a number of resources. Illustrations of anatomy and procedures are typically created by in-house artists. Categorization and classification systems are sourced from current textbooks. Evidence-based guidelines come from the organizations that evaluated the literature and promulgated the guidelines (e.g., American College of Emergency Physicians, American Stroke Association, American Heart Association, Infectious Disease Society of America, etc.). We utilize several online resources, including EB Medicine, UpToDate and others. We also regularly review periodicals, including NEJM Journal Watch, Emergency Medical Abstracts and the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Clinical resources are vetted in-house by board certified emergency physicians. When necessary they are also evaluated by members of the TSG RSQ® Collaborative, which includes a number of emergency and pediatric emergency physicians, as well as specialists in obstetrics, cardiology, surgery, neurology, toxicology and pulmonary and critical care.
Medical Professor Resources / RSQ Assist are updated twice per year and seamlessly pushed out to the end user by our IT team. Resources / RSQ Assist may be updated more frequently if there is a significant change or update in the medical literature. Additional content is often recommended by practitioners in over 500 emergency departments currently utilizing the Resources / RSQ Assist database.
How are practitioners trained to use Medical Professor™?
Medical Professor is an intuitive application and does not require much training. We provide access to two online courses, “Basics” and “Advanced Features” (60 min. each). We also offer on-site and/or virtual training sessions. In addition, practitioners will have the ability to practice documenting using Medical Professor in a demonstration environment to ensure they are proficient users of the application. (Training occurs concurrently with IT installation/setup and testing to accelerate implementation.)
Can practitioners access Medical Professor™ from a personal PC, Macintosh, Tablet, etc., outside of their facility?
Yes, practitioners can access Medical Professor from a personal PC, Macintosh, Tablet, etc., via their facility’s remote access (e.g., Citrix Remote Access).
What about Medical Professor™ pricing and ROI?
Medical Professor is licensed to hospitals based on the number of annual ED visits.
Although there are many workflow efficiencies and ancillary benefits, the ROI of Medical Professor largely revolves around reduction in liability costs from reduced adverse events stemming from dx-related errors (TAD, PE, Stroke, AMI, Sepsis, etc.). The Sullivan Group has helped the largest hospital system in the U.S. reduce its dx-related claim frequency by 71% over a 10-year period. The average cost of a dx-related claim is $508,000 in Emergency Medicine. In some cases, The Sullivan Group’s Risk Mitigation Module (active in Medical Professor) is paid by captive insurance companies (hospital, self-insured vehicle) or re/insurance carriers.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS – IT
How is the Medical Professor™ application loaded and installed/updated?
The Medical Professor application is loaded through Internet Explorer, typically where IE functions as a browser window (IFrame, Browser Control, etc.) invoked from within the EHR. The application is automatically loaded onto the client and run from the browser window. Outside of some initial configuration (e.g., security settings and making sure that the browser instance has access to the Medical Professor application servers), there is no further procedure to install or update the application.
How is Medical Professor™ data stored?
Data is stored in a segregated network for each facility/health system, securely encrypted and behind multiple access layers (multi-tiered firewall/DMZ model).
For each installation, database replication over geographically separated data centers is used to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, redundancy, and persistence of information.
At a technical level, data is stored in two formats:
- State Chain: A forensic audit is saved in a storage-optimized format used in the reconstruction of events on demand.
- Analytics: For system analytics and reporting, a relational-optimized format is stored and used for on-demand generated reports.
All data on production servers is encrypted, meeting current NIST recommendations (e.g., SP 800-175A) for sensitive information.
Nested encryption using separate keys is used for many fields (including ePHI and other sensitive data) to achieve even higher security.
What type of technical support does Medical Professor™ offer?
There is a “Support” icon that appears throughout the application; this allows practitioners to create support tickets to indicate any type of issue they may be experiencing. There is also a support hotline. Although we don’t anticipate any technical emergencies, Medical Professor offers dedicated 24-hour technical support.
It is important to note that in the case of power/data outages (and for training purposes), practitioners have the ability to use a separate, stand-alone desktop version of Medical Professor. (This desktop version is an optional component.)