Empathic and Polaris join forces to help improve the delivery of behavioral health care

Jan. 23, 2013 - PRLog -- Polaris Health Directions is pleased to announce that Empathic Clinical Suite has decided to integrate Polaris’s outcomes management technology into its cloud-based practice management platform for behavioral health. The merging of the two systems will provide a powerful solution for improving therapeutic outcomes: Clinicians will have more time for their patients, and a wealth of clinical data at their fingertips to help ensure patients receive the best course of care the first time around.

Empathic customers will have access to Polaris’s mental health outcomes assessment system (http://polarishealth.com/polaris-mh/), Polaris-MH, which is currently being used by large- and small-scale mental health providers around the country as well as by the Canadian Forces.

The Web-based system helps providers with the initial patient evaluation, treatment planning and monitoring of patient progress and satisfaction. It includes scales from the Addiction Severity Index and an Expected Treatment Response (ETR) model, which provides an objective, evidence-based method to determine whether treatment is working by comparing expected progress with actual progress.  

Empathic customers will also benefit from Polaris’s database of more than 250,000 patient assessments --and growing. As a learning system, Polaris-MH continuously hones its ability to determine what types of interventions are most appropriate, based on a patient’s treatment history, symptomology, strengths and other characteristics that impact outcomes.

Empathic’s comprehensive platform automates and streamlines the administrative tasks of a behavioral health practice. It includes an electronic record system, billing and scheduling capabilities, and clinical notes integration, among other features. As part of its clinical notes feature, the Empathic system is able to search through an electronic version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV-TR and suggest specific diagnoses based on the notes entered into the system.

For more information, please send an e-mail to moreinfo@polarishealth.com or visit: http://www.polarishealth.com. Follow Polaris on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/polarishealthdirections) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/PolarisHD).

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About Polaris Health Directions

Polaris recognizes that organizations cannot manage what they do not measure. Many behavioral health care providers and payers may not be collecting and analyzing enough of the right data to answer basic questions about the cost-effectiveness of the care they offer. Polaris's advanced technology and science driven assessment systems are designed to capture the clinical data essential to quality improvement and enhanced organizational management. Polaris solutions provide advanced analytics to help organizations improve and demonstrate to their customers the value of their care. With a focus on prediction, Polaris solutions do more than describe clinical change. Polaris systems also indicate if treatment is likely to have a positive result. Helping organizations make better decisions in the present by anticipating the future will be the difference in reducing their costs while improving patient care.

About Empathic Clinical Suite

First developed and launched to the behavioral health market in 2009, Empathic Clinical Suite comprises four discrete practice management modules and molds them into one fully integrated package of tools designed to make life easier and more profitable for the individual practitioner and group practice manager. The four distinct areas of Empathic involvement are:

Automated Agenda with Clinical and Practice Management Alerts
Centralized Patient Scheduling
Clinical Notes from Intake through Summary of Closure
Financial Center: Digital Billing, Claims and Accounting  

For more information on Empathic Clinical Suite, visit the company website atwww.empathic.com or call the company headquarters at 952-473-6200. Empathic is located at 700 Twelve Oaks Center Drive, Suite 204, Wayzata, MN 55391.