Emmi Solutions and Healthwise Set New Standard for Collaborative Communication with Patients

Leaders in prescriptive-quality health information announce strategic alliance that helps hospitals engage patients across the care continuum while improving clinical and financial outcomes

CHICAGO, Illinois and BOISE, Idaho (January 6, 2009) – Emmi Solutions, the leading provider of technology-based healthcare communication solutions, and Healthwise, an award-winning provider of consumer health information and programs, today announced a strategic alliance. This collaboration combines two best-in-class products and brings an unrivaled solution to the hospital market. The new product offering, called Emmi® + Healthwise®, gives hospitals and clinicians more in-depth and a wider range of information and tools they can prescribe to patients to empower them to take an active role in their care and help them make better health decisions throughout their lives.

Emmi + Healthwise takes Emmi Solutions content and a vast selection of Healthwise Information Therapy (Ix®) Solutions products—including information on medical procedures, wellness, discharge instructions and chronic disease self-management—and builds them into the Emmi Solutions communications platform. This combination creates an engaging and interactive multimedia experience that allows clinicians to prescribe and manage the delivery of consistent, vital health information. The platform also allows for the tracking of information received by patients, which can help hospitals meet quality and regulatory requirements and mitigate risk.

“We are extremely excited about our new agreement with Healthwise, which will create a best-in-class healthcare communication solution that offers prescriptive-quality information on virtually every specialty, condition and healthcare topic,” said Ron Rooth, CEO of Emmi Solutions. “By creating information pathways at every point of care and beyond—including pre-admission, in-patient, out-patient and post-discharge—this solution enables a more meaningful and efficient provider-patient relationship.”

Emmi + Healthwise has set the new standard for collaborative healthcare communication, enabling clinicians and hospitals to connect with patients across the continuum of care and throughout their lives—both in the clinical setting and at home. Emmi + Healthwise will be accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection. That’s important because statistics show the best time for patients to receive information is often outside the doctor’s office, where they are much more likely to retain, and act upon, the information. Plus, it enables patients to share the information with family and friends and revisit it as often as they like.

“Emmi + Healthwise will empower patients and support the broad effort to improve our healthcare system,” said Don Kemper, founder and CEO of Healthwise. “By providing a three-way collaborative communication solution—between consumers, their hospitals and their physicians—we are engaging and motivating the most underutilized resource in this healthcare crisis: patients.”

By extending the reach of clinicians, tracking the delivery of information and impacting patient behavior, Emmi + Healthwise can help hospitals mitigate and manage risk, increase patient and physician satisfaction, improve quality and patient safety and enhance operational efficiencies.

About Emmi Solutions, LLC
Emmi Solutions, LLC, is the creator of technology-based communication solutions and producer of award-winning Emmi programs. Hospitals and healthcare organizations nationwide use Emmi to engage patients and positively impact the patient experience across the continuum of care. Whether it’s helping people prepare for a procedure, manage a chronic disease, or successfully live with a medical device, every detail of the Emmi platform is designed with a single goal in mind: to improve the patient experience. Emmi Solutions’ clients and partners know the benefits of engaging patients to take an active role in their care: increased patient satisfaction, enhanced patient-physician relations, increased operational efficiencies, risk mitigation, and improved quality and safety. For more information, visit www.emmisolutions.com or call 1-866-294-3664.

About Healthwise
Healthwise is a nonprofit organization with a mission to help people make better health decisions. Nearly 111 million times a year, people turn to Healthwise information to learn how to do more for themselves, ask for the care they need, and say "no" to the care they don’t need. Healthwise partners with health plans, hospitals, disease management companies, and health Web sites to provide up-to-date, evidence-based information to the people they serve. To learn more about the Healthwise Information Therapy (Ix) Solution, visit www.healthwise.org or call 1-800-706-9646.