BOSTON – Caritas Christi Health Care of Boston, billed as the largest community-based hospital system in New England, is expanding its electronic healthcare record service to its physician networks.

More than 500 medical providers in Caritas Christi's owned physician network and 1,200 providers in its affiliated physician network will be provided with the athenClinicals EHR service from Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth.

"Athenahealth's centrally hosted EHR service platform will allow Caritas Christi and their medical providers to experience a 'network effect' in which shared clinical knowledge and best practices from across athenahealth's entire national client base can enable them to improve care coordination and patient outcomes through greater transparency into physician performance across their growing network," said Jonathan Bush, athenahealth's chairman and CEO.

"The growing demands on our medical providers and staff to stay current with changing reimbursement protocols, increased consumer responsibility and performance-based clinical reporting have required our health system to harness more flexible, network-based services like athenahealth's," said Caritas Christi CEO and President Ralph de la Torre. "We feel this new clinical platform will allow us to achieve our aggressive quality-of-care goals and execute on new programs like our recently announced Alternative Quality Contract (AQC) with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts."

Under the AQC, Caritas Christi will increase its focus on preventive care by giving physicians the flexibility to allocate healthcare resources based on what will have the greatest benefits to patient health. Caritas Christ officials have also overhauled several corporate structures and are making key strategic partnerships and investments, including a recent agreement with Microsoft to implement the Amalga Unified Intelligence System, a data aggregation platform that will allow providers to share patient data across systems.

"Given the rapid change we are seeing in healthcare and what will be required from providers in terms of tracking and reporting clinical information, athenaClinicals will enable us to better control our clinical supply chain, respond to rapidly evolving requirements of emerging programs like the HITECH Act and enable our physicians to demonstrate meaningful use of an electronic health record system," said Todd Rothenhaus, MD, senior vice president and chief information officer for Caritas Christi.