SALT LAKE CITY – Intermountain Healthcare will use Initiate Interoperable Health as the foundation of its new enterprise clinical information system. The system will facilitate advanced clinical decision support within an environment of information sharing.

Intermountain, based in Salt Lake City, employs more than 31,000 healthcare workers and operates 23 hospitals, a physician group with associated ambulatory clinics and a health plan division serving residents of Utah and southeastern Idaho. It also serves as a major referral center for six surrounding states.

Developed by Chicago-based Initiate Systems, Initiate Interoperable Health facilitates a comprehensive view of a patient or provider across time and clinical settings for use by healthcare applications and portals. The platform associates "same persons" across disparate health information systems. As part of Intermountain's service-oriented architecture for its clinical information system, Initiate's solution will serve as a single-source registry for patients and providers.

Using this strategy, departmental systems interoperating with the new registry will yield improvements in longitudinal patient data integrity while lowering the operational costs of data synchronization found in former integration strategies that required multiple redundant master person index (MPI) copies, Intermountain executives said.

"We wanted Initiate Interoperable Health at the foundation of our enterprise clinical information system not to simply replace our current EMPI functionality but to take the concept of a single-source, interoperable registry service from the whiteboard to production," said Marc Probst, CIO for Intermountain Healthcare.

Lorraine Fernandes, Initiate's vice president and industry ambassador, said Initiate Interoperable Health helps healthcare organizations achieve objectives targeted at reducing medical errors by:

* Improving access to patient information at all points of care;
* Increasing operational efficiencies by recognizing patients and providers across all points of registration; and,
* Lowering costs by reducing resources required for data governance and quality.

Initiate's solutions are in use today in more than 100 healthcare organizations worldwide – at hospitals, integrated delivery networks and regional health information organizations, payers, retail pharmacies and government health agencies.

"Intermountain is really tapping into the strength of Initiate's technology," Fernandes said. "Initiate Interoperable Health will facilitate the exchange and coordination of patient medical records and provider data across the enterprise clinical information system to help Intermountain deliver more patient-centered service."