Top Israeli HMO, Maccabi Healthcare Services, Makes Its Advanced Medical Information and Management Solution Available To HMOs Worldwide.

World Bank Finances Bulgaria's Choice of Maccabi together with others

NEW ORLEANS -- Leading Israeli HMO Maccabi Healthcare Services is making its technology-driven Health Value Added (HVA) Knowledge Base, currently used to manage over 30 million patient-HMO interactions annually among its 1.7 million members available for adoption by HMOs worldwide. This Knowledge Base enables HMOs to harness the power of HIT (healthcare information technology) to achieve unprecedented levels of excellence in medicine quality, cost containment and service delivery.

HVA Knowledge Base enables HMOs to measure quality of care, improve budgeting and increase member satisfaction by recording, analyzing and making accessible all patient medical data, including all patient-HMO interactions. HMO health practitioners edit and view patient information in real-time, subject to confidentiality safeguards, while HMO management can analyze macro-data to improve business efficiency and track medical trends.

The solution, offered as a flexible hands-on consulting service. Client organizations can elect to use Maccabi's integrated IT platform or transfer its principles and methodology to their own IT system.

World Bank Finances Bulgaria's Choice of Maccabi

Maccabi was selected over well-known global IT firms as a key member of the consortium building a new medical information and management system for Bulgaria's health system. The project was managed according to protocols of the World Bank, which is financing the [euro]3.5 million project. The system will serve eight million people when fully implemented.

"We are a healthcare provider, not a technology company, giving us profound insight into HMOs' needs," said Ofer Carmel, CEO of Maccabi Group Holdings. "Our system is the healthcare delivery backbone for almost two million Israelis, whose healthcare expenditure, is only 2/3 as much per capita as countries like Sweden or France, and 1/3 that of the US. Yet Israel has comparable and often better life expectancy and child/adult mortality rates, and lower expenditure as a percent of GDP - only 60% that of the US."

The integrated IT systems enables HMO management to analyze disease incidence, morbidity and other factors that help identify medical outcomes and trends, staff productivity and patient compliance. HMO members can view their password-protected personal file at any time.

Key wards: Health, IT, Israel, Pharmacy, Physician, World Bank, Bulgaria, HIMSS, HMO, Information System, Diagnostics, Patient, HIT.