By John Otrompke

April 30, 2015 | CHICAGO--HIMSS 2015 filled the McCormick Place Convention Center, with several clinical-IT vendors highlighting new products on the trade show floor.

A team from the Deloitte consulting firm was on-hand discussing multiple new products and services, such as Semantic Open Source Software (Semoss), a data and research platform with diverse uses that was first announced at HIMSS 2014, in its desktop version.

Semoss, a natural language reader and data crawler first designed to help the federal government’s armed services health care program visualize and organize data from over 3,800 IT systems, has been growing a fan base. The web version of the freeware was made available online in November 2014.

“Outside of federal health, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration has been using Semoss to try to understand if a weather station goes down, whether they can pull the information from surrounding stations,” explained Brian Galbraith, senior consultant at Deloitte Services LP, who noted that the software is starting to be used in industry as well, such as the financial services and insurance sectors.

Software manufacturer eClinical Works unveiled its latest offerings including Telehealth, which began its pilot a month ago. “We are the first vendor to have telemedicine integrated with the EHR. If someone presents with a lesion, the doctor can take a picture during the consultation, and store it in the record, so that you can do a comparison later on,” said Heather Caouette, who works for the company.

Ten practices have signed up to begin using the service, which costs $149 per provider per month, and two practices are currently using the telehealth service, she added.

The company also announced its new patient engagement platform Healow shortly before the HIMSS meeting. The technology works with brands like Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings and iHealth, added Caouette, who noted that everything the company does on the patient side is free.

Diagnostics industry giant Quest was also on hand to discuss the release of Interactive Insights, the report of diagnostic results and content which is available to consumers on MyQuest.

“The Office of the National Coordinator at HHS mandated at HIMSS last year that the laboratory provide the patient with information. You’re used to seeing a lab report on which your value is put in bold if it is out of the reference range, but that is rudimentary, and looks like a typewriter,” said Tom Wagner, chief technology officer at Quest.

“That information is available to physicians on Care 360, but we have a version for the patient, so that it doesn’t look like the same image as the one seen by the doctor,” Wagner explained. Interactive Insights was released in December of 2014 in its pilot format.

“If your thyroid test comes back positive, [Interactive Insights] will help you understand, what should you do?” Quest also worked on research with people from the University of California at San Francisco, on the development of a cognitive test assessment tool currently available on iTunes. After an assessment, the tool alerts people if their scores are within the range for dementia. “Most primary care physicians know very little about dementia,” added Wagner.