Tampa General Hospital and USF Health Implement careMESH to Advance Care Team Collaboration with Community Providers

The company securely delivers Patient Event Notifications, Referrals, and Transitions of Care to all outside providers and practices

RESTON, Va., Sept. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- careMESH today announced that it has launched its services with both Tampa General Hospital (TGH) and USF Health (USF). Integrated with TGH's Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR), patient admission and discharge notifications are automatically and digitally sent to the patient's primary care physician, and clinical staff are able to send referrals and transitions of care to any provider in the country.

"We have long sought new ways to engage with the community and better communicate and collaborate with partner physicians and practices while ensuring operational efficiency and patient privacy. We were drawn to careMESH because they solve a key challenge: how to move all communications with external clinicians to digital communications," said Scott Arnold, Executive VP & Chief Information Officer for Tampa General Hospital.

Scott ArnoldAdded Dr. Nishit Patel, Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Tampa General Hospital and USF Health: "Private practice partners are the lifeblood of our community, so we are eager to engage with them about mutual patients, proactively share notifications with embedded digital patient records, and offer them a chance to stay deeply involved at every step of the patient care journey. careMESH securely delivers patient information to our community providers, gives them immediate access to a rich set of tools, and provides them with a mechanism to communicate back to us digitally."

Hospital users access the careMESH National Provider Directory from within the EMR and save the patient's PCP and/or specialist(s) in the patient chart. Then, both automated and manual workflows leverage the directory information and careMESH's unique delivery management service to virtually guarantee digital delivery of patient health information, such as discharge summaries, consultation reports, lab results, and more, to the right recipient(s). careMESH makes it possible for hospitals to reach any provider nationwide, without requiring recipients to pay or join a network, and:

• Nishit PatelMeet CMS Promoting Interoperability measures from within their EMR
• Meet regulatory requirements for Patient Event Notifications (e.g. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule and FL 843)
• Improve revenue through better management of referrals and outside physician networks
• Eliminate the risk of non-deliverable referrals and improve care coordination

"Tampa General Hospital and USF Health are amazingly innovative healthcare organizations and have set a new standard in how hospitals can coordinate care with outside physicians and practices. Our platform was designed from the ground up to modernize healthcare communications, allowing doctors to digitally communicate with anybody and share patient records, without leaving their EHR," said Dr. Peter S. Tippett, careMESH Founder and CEO.

About careMESH

careMESH is a first-of-its-kind healthcare communications platform bringing together a national provider directory, patient event notifications, secure communications, and transition of care workflows into a single service. careMESH connects the care continuum by allowing any provider working with any electronic health record to communicate and collaborate with any other, instantly. careMESH's cloud-based services efficiently allow hospitals and health systems, health information exchanges, public health agencies, and physician groups to communicate about patients, maintain complete control over when and where information is shared, and rapidly reduce reliance on outdated tools such as fax and phone calls.

About Tampa General Hospital

Tampa General Hospital, a 1007-bed non-profit academic medical center, delivers world-class care as the region's only center for Level l trauma and comprehensive burn care. It is one of the nation's busiest adult solid organ transplant centers and is the primary teaching hospital for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. With five medical helicopters, Tampa General Hospital transports critically injured or ill patients from 23 surrounding counties to receive the advanced care they need. Tampa General houses a nationally accredited comprehensive stroke center and its 32-bed Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit is the largest on the West Coast of Florida. It also is home to an 82-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, and a state-certified spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation center. Tampa General Hospital's footprint includes 14 Tampa General Medical Group Primary Care offices, TGH Family Care Center Kennedy, TGH Brandon Healthplex, TGH Virtual Care, 15 outpatient Radiology Centers and a TGH Urgent Care located in Brandon. As one of the largest hospitals in Florida, Tampa General Hospital is first in the state to open a command center in partnership with GE Healthcare. For more information, go to www.tgh.org.

About USF Health

USF Health's mission is to envision and implement the future of health. It is the partnership of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the College of Public Health, the Taneja College of Pharmacy, the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences, the Biomedical Sciences Graduate and Postdoctoral Programs, and USF Health's multispecialty physicians group. The University of South Florida is a high-impact global research university dedicated to student success. Over the past 10 years, no other public university in the country has risen faster in U.S. News and World Report's national university rankings than USF. For more information, visit health.usf.edu

Media Contact:
Catherine Thomas
careMESH, VP Customer Experience