CHRISTUS Health, a Catholic not-for-profit health system, has announced plans to roll out Medicity's full technology suite to drive health information exchange infrastructure development across Texas, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Georgia, Utah and New Mexico.
"This HIE initiative will enable everyone across our diverse community of providers to coordinate care and to connect with patients, registries, and other HIEs regardless of state boundaries," said George Conklin, CIO of CHRISTUS Health, which is comprised of nearly 350 services and facilities, including more than 50 hospitals and long-term care facilities and 175 clinics and outpatient centers.
"We aim to enhance quality of care, reduce costs and prepare our community for the future healthcare landscape," he added.
Building on its adoption of Medicity's Novo Grid, which enables result and report distribution and EHR integration from CHRISTUS facilities to physician practices, CHRISTUS will expand upon its current bidirectional HIE capabilities to include the deployment of Medicity's ProAccess Community and MediTrust Cloud Services as well as ambulatory order initiation, physician referrals and CCD exchange.
The health system will begin its phased implementation by extending Grid connectivity to an additional 900 employed and affiliated physicians – whether or not the practice has an EHR system – while promoting adoption and meaningful use of EHRs.
CHRISTUS will also focus on automating laboratory and radiology orders across the grid infrastructure and implementing peer-to-peer referral functionality to create a sophisticated bidirectional health information exchange environment.
Enabling the community health record will constitute the third phase of implementation, followed by patient engagement initiatives and extending access to the community health record to long-term care and home health providers.
CHRISTUS Health, an early adopter of Medicity's iNexx platform, will continue to deploy the technology throughout Texas before expanding its use to all CHRISTUS communities across seven states. As the largest not-for-profit health system in Texas with a significant rural population, CHRISTUS is using iNexx to help community health workers support indigent and chronically ill patients and to provide modular, meaningful use apps to providers who cannot afford full EHR systems. CHRISTUS also has plans to develop its own apps to run on the iNexx platform.
"We see tremendous opportunity to create apps that address the specific challenges of community and rural providers," said Hank Fanberg, director of technology advocacy at CHRISTUS Health. "The iNexx technology will enable us to develop apps that operate seamlessly on the platform at a low cost. We view this as an important way for us to fulfill our responsibility to our diverse communities."
"CHRISTUS Health is taking a very strategic, carefully planned, bottom-up approach to health information exchange," said Kipp Lassetter, MD, CEO of Medicity, which last week announced that it had been acquired by Aetna. "By facilitating care collaboration across the community and engaging the patient to play an active role in healthcare, CHRISTUS is building a solid foundation for improving the quality and cost of care."
