Your Healthcare IT Clients Are Facing EHR Integration Issues After Healthcare Consolidation
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Your EHR clients’ landscape will be changing, largely in part to mass consolidations of hospitals across the country.
This example is possibly best seen in Atlantic Health System in New Jersey. According to EHR Intelligence, the system has been working to spread itself throughout the state and has been dealing with the EHR integration challenges that have come with their growth.
CHIME
At a track session at the College Of Healthcare Information Management Executives’ 2014 Fall CIO Forum, Atlantic Health System’s VP Of Behavioral And Integrative Medicine and CIO, Linda Reed, RN, MBA, FCHIME, CHCIO, spoke with attendees about the organization’s satisfaction with the integration process: “We are the proud owners of about 18 ambulatory EMR systems. We’re just seeing consolidation happen so fast that we’re thinking there won’t be but two or three systems in the state of New Jersey probably in the next three to four years. How do you get a handle on integrating the things that you have to integrate and how do you do all that work when you have all this constant change? My staff is just beside themselves every day.”
During one of the breakout sessions (“IT Realities Of Health System Integration”) Reed went into detail about the various integration efforts going on at Atlantic Health — most recently, AllSpire, which is a consortium of seven organizations in the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Atlantic Health Situation
The seven organizations were running on a mixture of systems, with four being on Epic, and one each on McKesson, Cerner, and Siemens.
This mixture of systems left the organization asking questions around integration not only at the local level, but also at the consortium level, and most interested in finding efficiencies and economies of scale.
One of their biggest challenges was the sunsetting of their go-forward EHR technology.
“We really did have an EHR direction, so we did rip and replace. We put in our McKesson system and that was going to be our go-forward system and you all know where that is. That Horizon system is no longer the go-forward system and that kind of blew up our plan.”
The experience has changed the way that Atlantic addresses EHR integration, and has led to a new approach that balances the clinical and billing sides of new facility infrastructure: “One hospital is a MEDITECH hospital. We have left them on MEDITECH for the most part. We’re bringing in the patient financials into our STAR system and doing the billing out of there. The second hospital is a Cerner clinicals with a QuadraMed financials. There what we have done is we have taken the QuadraMed out and interfaced the existing Cerner clinicals into Star and we’ll have one billing system there.”