Catholic Health Initiatives to build enterprise HIE

Catholic Health Initiatives is partnering with Orion Health to build an enterprise-wide HIE that will enable physicians and clinicians to access patient records across its 100 facilities in 19 states. Once connected, CHI plans to link to statewide HIEs in states where its 76 hospitals are located.

The second largest Catholic healthcare system in the U.S. will deploy Orion Health HIE to support its $1.5 billion OneCare program, which will create a shared, universal patient record documenting its more than 400,000 hospital admissions and nearly five million physician office visits annually.

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Once the HIE is live across CHI’s 76 hospitals, 40 long-term and assisted care facilities, two community health-services organizations, two accredited nursing colleges and numerous home health agencies, by June 2015, the hospital system plans to expand and connect to statewide HIEs in states where its facilities are based. CHI is also looking to eventually connect to the Nationwide Health Information Network.

The OneCare Program, which predated the HITECH Act and was called the Clinical Information Technology program, was created to increase patient safety and improve clinical quality and the patient experience. It was expanded to cover meaningful use Stages 1 and 2. More importantly, OneCare is positioning CHI to be able to conduct population and disease management and take on shared risk – all of the components of accountable care organizations (ACOs) , according to Michael O’Rourke, senior vice president and CIO for CHI.

CHI, which is headquartered in Englewood, Colo., is involved in pilots in three major healthcare markets – Des Moines, Iowa; Kentucky and Nebraska – in which local relationships with other healthcare organizations are being leveraged to create an ACO. The Des Moines pilot is establishing a disease registry and determining the best way to manage this new model of care. CHI is identifying the market dynamics that offer a venue for testing the new models, O’Rourke said.

“As we go forward, even though the provision of care is instrumental to the patient, running the business is going to be generated on the intelligence, the information we gather – information about patients, populations, diseases, how they’re being managed, whether they’re improving or not improving, and how we compare to others who are doing the same work so we can get the best practices,” he said.

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Electronic health records and HIE are the infrastructure to provide the intelligence to manage disease states and populations, and take on risk, which is where the market is going, according to O’Rourke.