BOSTON – Caritas Christi Health Care, a community-based hospital network, serving Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and Rhode Island, is in the second wave of an electronic health records implementation for its 1,200 physicians in its IPA.

Caritas is deploying Westborough, Mass.-based eClinicalWorks to the IPA, which is made up of small practices with one to three providers.  In its second wave the hospital decided to use North Chelmsford, Mass.-based Concordant to help teach and implement best practices throughout the network using the Concordant Clinical University (CCU) offering.

CCU is a methodology to bring onboard, train, and provide practical mentoring of practice consultants who are at the center of EHR implementations. The approach means that Concordant interviews hires, and trains Caritas’practice consultants. Concordant assigns the senior clinical IT consultants to a less experienced practice client consultant and puts them through a certification process from the planning stage through implementation.
Concordant is also helping with remediation with practices that were a part of the first wave of implementation.

Todd Rothenhaus, MD, senior vice president and chief information officer at Caritas Christi Health Care System, has been working on the first wave of the EHR rollout to the physicians over the last two years. He says Caritas has faced some unintended consequences from trying to rush its previous deployments.

“The key is understanding the million little nuances that go with these projects, it’s like a magnifying lens into the organization, says Janie Tremlett, senior vice president and strategic marketing manager, Concordant.
Concordant works in conjunction with practices for 20-24 weeks while Caritas had been trying to work within a 12-week time frame. “It showed us that extending implementation gives us more time to make the adjustment,” said Rothenhaus.

Patricia Cox, vice president, ambulatory, imaging systems at Caritas Christi, was asked to task the EHR project last year. The biggest thing Concordant did was to help us set standards and parameters of how this was going to be deployed, she said.

Concordant makes it possible for Caritas to train the consultant in Caritas’ workflow and standards.

For the past three years, Caritas has rolled out EHRs to 45 physicians a year.  Now using Concordant the health system plans to roll them out to 240 physicians a year. Sixty-eight practices are expected to go live at the end of this year. “At the rate we were going this would have taken over seven years,” said Rothenhaus.

The next EHR wave will depend on the stimulus package said Rothenhaus. He says he’s glad the hospital doesn’t have to “scramble to start something” and says they are in “good shape” for the 2011 deadline.