NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) announced today the introduction of Echo Inc. to the marketplace, its newly formed company that combines its HealthLine Systems and SyMed Development businesses, which were acquired in March 2015 and October 2012, respectively. Together, Echo is established as the market leader in medical staff credentialing, payer credentialing, provider enrollment, provider analytics, and contact center solutions to transform patient experiences beginning at the first touch point. More than 2,000 healthcare organizations are already benefitting from Echo's powerful suite of products.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150929005483/en/

"Today is an exciting day for our clients, employees, and our ‘Plugged into Echo' partners. Building on the successes of our predecessor companies, Echo's solutions are playing a crucial role as hospitals seek to transform manual, error-prone activities into scalable, paperless processes that comply with regulations and optimize outcomes," said Michael J. Sousa, president, Echo. "Moreover, I am excited about our emerging innovations, which I believe will shorten credentialing and enrollment timelines, boost care quality, fuel admissions, and bolster patient and provider satisfaction."

Echo offers five primary solutions for healthcare organizations, which can be deployed individually or integrated.

• EchoCredentialing is a comprehensive platform to manage medical staff credentialing and privileging processes. It delivers an enterprise-class platform that enables paperless processes, unified privileging, one-click integration with our partnered, NCQA-certified CVO services to support periodic volume spikes, and an innovative Provider Navigator portal that provides online credentialing applications, credentialing committee assessments, peer review workflows, and real-time provider reviews with update capabilities.
• EchoOneApp is a solution for payer credentialing, consisting of a full-featured provider enrollment platform that includes automatic form population from a continuously updated library of over 3,200 pre-formatted payer form templates as well as online form integration with CAQH, CMS PECOS, and state-based payer enrollment sites.
• EchoAccess is an enterprise-class platform to support hospital contact centers including physician referral, clinical triage, provider directories, class enrollment, and a discharge planning functionality. It enables streamlined access to care, helps to bridge the transition to value-based reimbursement, and provides trust-building personal connections at a hospital's critical first point of contact.
• EchoAnalytics provides a wide array of validation tools, including license, exclusion, and sanction monitoring; provider scorecards—including OPPE/FPPE, CMS Open Payments, CAHPS, and social media ratings; and dashboard and benchmarks for process metrics.
• EchoOnboarding - our forthcoming solution that consists of an onboarding dashboard, intuitive workflows for a provider to manage his or her progress, and onboarding navigator tools to enable the management and monitoring by the multitude of departments involved in provider onboarding.

Echo is also launching its "Plugged into Echo" network, a growing eco-system of partners who provide solutions for the Echo community.

• Valence Health, a leading provider of value-based care solutions, powers a unique solution known as EchoOPPECompare, which provides benchmarks for OPPE metrics that enable the comparison of providers to external OPPE-related data.
• Binary Fountain will power the EchoPSI Scorecard with its Provider Social Index (PSI), providing a comprehensive measure of provider reputation across social media, rating/review sites, and a growing number of online sources.
• HealthStream's Jericho-based office (Health Care Compliance Strategies), offers compliance solutions that provide another plug-in to Echo's eco-system, which powers its Open Payments Scorecard for EchoCredentialing clients.
• Schmitt-Thompson Clinical Content, a leading provider of telephone triage care, is the clinical content provider for the EchoAccess contact center solution.
• Madaket Health will power the EchoOneEDI solution, which automates enrollment in Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA), Electronic Data Interchange for Claims (EDI), Claims Status Inquiry (CSI), and Eligibility Verification (EV) directly with payers.

"Binary Fountain is proud to ‘Plug into Echo' with the first ever, standardized, metric-based, open, social media data," said Rahul Prakash, Binary Fountain co-founder and head of corporate development. "We believe our partnership with Echo, a HealthStream Company, will significantly enhance the platform."

"Madaket Health is very excited to join the "Plugged into Echo" partnership program," said Jim Dougherty, co-founder and chief executive officer, Madaket Health. "EchoOneEDI will be powered by our solution to automate the enrollment of providers into EFT, ERA, EDI, CSI, and EV programs. We look forward to bringing this innovation to the Echo community and are confident that the results will be both unique and compelling."

As a HealthStream company, Echo provides an important dimension to HealthStream's overall strategy to support healthcare organizations and their respective workforces—in significant ways that benefit hospitals—ways that are not offered by any other vendor. As hospitals manage required workforce training and certifications, they can then automatically feed that data directly from the HealthStream Learning Center (HLC) to EchoCredentialing, which is vastly more efficient than the way most hospitals complete this process now. In addition, EchoCredentialing clients will be able to set up hospitals' non-employed providers (e.g. many physicians, etc.) in the HLC with a feed from EchoCredentialing software, thereby centralizing the process to track the non-employed providers' training, certifications, and continuing education. Also, as a CAHPS provider, HealthStream can translate its extensive patient satisfaction data into a CAHPS provider scorecard in EchoCredentialing and into a provider directory in EchoAccess.

"At HealthStream, it has always been our goal to support healthcare organizations in surrounding the patient with the best developed workforce," said Robert A. Frist, Jr., chief executive officer, HealthStream. "We view provider credentialing and its related processes as a baseline, critical gateway to patient safety and quality care. Our innovative approach represents, I believe, an exciting future for hospitals and providers as we advance technology to use data intelligently, streamline processes, and create a powerful eco-system of capabilities."

You can learn more about Echo and its solutions by visiting its website: www.echo-solutions.com. Echo will be exhibiting and participating in several large healthcare conferences, beginning with NAMSS, MGMA, and SHSMD in October 2015.

About HealthStream

HealthStream (NASDAQ: HSTM) is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations' greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by healthcare organizations in the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Our patient experience/research solutions provide valuable insight to healthcare providers to meet CAHPS requirements, improve the patient experience, engage their workforce, and enhance physician alignment. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has additional offices in Laurel, Maryland; Brentwood, Tennessee; Pensacola, Florida; Jericho, New York; and San Diego, California. For more information, visit http://www.healthstream.com or call 800-933-9293.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties regarding HealthStream. Investors are cautioned that such results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual future events or results. This information has been included in reliance on the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual future events or results. These forward-looking statements are based on a variety of assumptions that may not be realized, and which are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, including that the acquisition may not be consummated and that the anticipated financial and strategic benefits of the acquisition may not be realized, as well as risks and uncertainties referenced from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150929005483/en/

HealthStream
Mollie Condra, Ph.D., 615-301-3237
mollie.condra@healthstream.com

Source: HealthStream

News Provided by Acquire Media