Netsmart Technologies Selected by Mountain Lakes Behavioral Healthcare for Continued Behavioral Health Software Solutions

Netsmart Software Will Facilitate Clinical and Practice Management Processes for Alabama Behavioral Health Organization

Great River, N.Y. (September 23, 2009) – Netsmart Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of software and services for health and human services organizations, today announced an agreement to provide its CCHIT-certified clinical and practice management behavioral health software and related services to Mountain Lakes Behavioral Healthcare of Guntersville, Ala.

Mountain Lakes provides outpatient and residential mental health and substance abuse treatment services for adults, older adults and veterans. The company serves 5,000 clients across five facilities in northern Alabama.

A Netsmart customer since 2000, Mountain Lakes is transitioning from Netsmart’s CMHC/MIS software to the company’s Avatar software suite. In making the transition, Mountain Lakes took advantage of Netsmart programs designed to help organizations utilize software platforms within the Netsmart family of software solutions that best meet their needs and requirements.

Mountain Lakes will use the Avatar CCHIT-certified clinical solution and practice management capabilities as the foundation for its operations, including scheduling, assessments, treatment planning, billing and state reporting. In addition, the agency will use Avatar’s document management and electronic signature features to facilitate the flow of clinical information throughout the organization as part of its mission of providing high quality residential and outpatient care to consumers.

Netsmart’s clinical solution will help ensure Mountain Lakes meets the “meaningful use” requirements for eligibility for federal grants and potential Medicaid and Medicare incentives.

“As a long-time Netsmart customer, we knew we could count on their software and continued expertise as we continue to grow our organization’s services,” said Kert Redstrom, executive director, Mountain Lakes Behavioral Healthcare. “We explored other software, but chose to continue with Netsmart because of their ability to help us smoothly transition to other Netsmart software, competitive pricing, knowledge of industry legislation and certification standards, and ability to help us meet Alabama state reporting requirements.”

RADplus, Avatar’s flexible configuration and management tool, will furnish Mountain Lakes with comprehensive access and security management, modeling, table and dictionary maintenance, and ad hoc report integration. Mountain Lakes’ database requirements will be supported by InterSystems Corporation’s Cache’ second generation database management solution, which is fully integrated with Avatar.

“We’re pleased to continue our longstanding relationship with Mountain Lakes to support their growth and provision of high quality behavioral health services,” said James L. Conway, chief executive officer, Netsmart Technologies. “Our comprehensive solutions are easily implemented and will provide Mountain Lakes with the clinical and billing resources, data integration and reporting capabilities they need both now and well into the future.”

About Netsmart Technologies, Inc.
Netsmart Technologies is an established, leading supplier of enterprise software and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for health and human services providers. More than 18,000 customer organizations, including 350,000 care providers and nearly 40 state systems, use Netsmart products to help improve the quality of life for millions of people each year.

Netsmart’s customers include mental health and substance abuse treatment agencies, psychiatric hospitals, private and group mental health practices, public health departments, vital records offices and managed care organizations. Netsmart’s products are full-featured information systems that operate on a variety of operating systems, hardware platforms, and mobile devices, and offer unlimited scalability.

Netsmart’s Connected Care initiative allows behavioral and public healthcare providers to share clinical data electronically within their internal processes, externally with other providers, and with consumers via a Web-based portal, enabling high quality, consumer-directed care.

With the certification of its Avatar 2006 software, Netsmart became the first behavioral healthcare, public health, substance abuse and methadone software and services provider to have a product certified according to the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) Ambulatory EHR 2006 criteria.

Netsmart provides solutions that help its customers meet the evolving definition of “meaningful use” under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. These include a certified electronic health record, the InfoScriber e-prescribing service, the CareConnect service that enables the sharing of clinical information through health information exchanges, and a flexible platform to capture and share outcomes data.

Source: Netsmart