Mirth and Pfizer Reach Licensing Agreement for InformaCare®, Mirth Launches Advanced Care Management Platform for Patient Centered Medical Homes and Accountable Care Organizations

Press Release | Mirth Corporation, Pfizer, Inc. | April 5, 2011

Mirth Corporation, the leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, enables the rapid and secure exchange of critical patient information within healthcare delivery organizations and across broad geographies. Now Mirth’s client organizations rolling out Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) initiatives can harness these data sources to power comprehensive, cloud-based care management services with minimal overhead. Mirth technology allows those who care for patients to have needed information such as allergies, conditions, medications, and test results at their fingertips, rather than locked in a distant paper chart or in a “siloed” computer system.

For over a decade, Mirth has developed, improved and operated the InformaCare system on behalf of Pfizer Health Solutions. InformaCare served as the technology foundation for pioneering community-wide care management initiatives, such as the “Florida: A Healthy State” (FAHS) initiative. FAHS reached over 120,000 Medicaid patients, involved 10 health systems and 300 community groups. FAHS, which was an at-risk program sponsored by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), improved clinical measures around diabetes, asthma, congestive heart failure and hypertension, and significantly reduced costly ER visits and hospital inpatient days.

Through a license agreement with Pfizer, Mirth can now offer InformaCare to its clients wishing to implement population health management initiatives, and further develop the InformaCare code base to introduce new innovations and capabilities. Mirth will make the platform available to its healthcare clients under the Mirth Care brand.

“Many of the nation’s most progressive healthcare organizations are now piloting patient-centered medical home models and undergoing clinical process transformation to become Accountable Care Organizations. Two fundamental features of these new care delivery models are the use of data to reach out and engage patients proactively in their own health, and to prepare for new reimbursement models that pay for outcomes, rather than activity,” said Jon Teichrow, president of Mirth Corporation. “Mirth Care sits on top of the data integration layer we’ve already built for our clients, and unlocks the power of that data to drive care management processes leading to better management of costly and debilitating chronic health conditions.”

“In Florida and elsewhere Pfizer has demonstrated how community-wide, data-driven care management is not only possible but essential to achieving better care at lower costs. We want that legacy continued through Mirth’s work with its client healthcare organizations nationwide,” said Molly Lenz, Sr Director, Pfizer, Inc.

Mirth Care connects Care Managers with patients while keeping physicians in the loop. It integrates clinical records, claims history and patient-collected data to inform phone-based patient counseling. It supports telephonic outreach to engage patients and produces clinical quality reports that substantiate the value of patient-centered and Accountable Care models.