Nov. 2, 2009 (PR Newswire) --

CINCINNATI, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MedPlus®, the healthcare information technology subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics® Incorporated (NYSE: DGX), today announced the release of ChartMaxx® V5.5, an upgrade to its industry-leading ChartMaxx document management and imaging solution. With the new optional RAC Manager, ChartMaxx V5.5 helps health care providers tie together electronic forms, discrete data, color coded timers and e-mail alerts, dashboard reports, and release of information functionality to track, respond to, and report on, requests from RAC auditors. According to the KLAS (1) Enterprise DMI: Finding the Right Stepping-Stone to Full EMR report issued on October 21, 2009 (www.KLASresearch.com), MedPlus is the health care industry's number one Document Management & Imaging (DMI) vendor, noted for its ChartMaxx® enterprise-wide electronic patient record system.

The ability to make informed responses to RAC requests is vitally important to health care institutions," said Richard Mahoney, MedPlus president and vice president of Healthcare Information Solutions for Quest Diagnostics. "ChartMaxx V5.5 with RAC Manager empowers health enterprises with a fully integrated system and proven tools that helps them to extract the data they need to manage the RAC process effectively."

ChartMaxx V5.5 RAC Manager integrates workflows and reporting tools and deals with every step in the RAC process from pro-active data mining to reactive steps including disclosing documents from medical records, tracking all levels of the appeals process and providing graphical reports to identify the hospital's risk. The solution provides reliable data for strategic decision making, and reporting tools and e-mail alerts make the potentially numerous processes transparent so productivity issues can be effectively addressed. The RAC Manager provides a pre-built Intelligent e-Form with reports including dashboards, document types, workflow and work lists to enable transparency and tracking for each step of the RAC process.

"Hospitals across the country are actively searching for ways to handle what is a detailed multi-step auditing and appeals process," said Marcia Matthias, corporate director of Health Information for Southern Illinois Healthcare. "With just 45 days to receive, process and return potentially hundreds of records, effective management of RAC audit requests becomes especially critical. If a hospital misses a RAC deadline, overpayment is presumed without an option to appeal.