MONROE, MI – Mercy Memorial Hospital System, a 238-bed community hospital in metropolitan Detroit, selected Allscripts as its enterprise-wide health information technology provider, enabling the hospital, its 200 staff physicians, and post-acute care providers to connect and collaborate for a team approach to improving patient care.

Mercy Memorial's implementation will include Allscripts acute care electronic health record, its EHR and practice management technology for the hospital's employed and affiliated physicians. The rollout will also include Allscripts Care Management discharge planning solution to streamline patient movement through the hospital and provide continuity of care following discharge to the post-acute care or the patient's home.

For the hospital system's CIO, Bruce Kelly, it means the hospital will give up its legacy McKesson technology for a new enterprise-wide electronic health record that will work with the ambulatory EHR. The physician offices are still paper-based.

Kelly came on board at Mercy Memorial about two years ago.

"All of our systems are many releases behind," he said. "So we started looking at replacing systems rather than upgrading systems. That's how far behind we are."

Kelly and his team were looking at the Eclipsys acute care EHR when Eclipsys and Allscripts announced they would merge on June 9.

"That's where our project really started – finding something for the acute care market," Kelly said. The merger added additional impetus to go with Eclipsys, he added, because other hospital vendors don't have a "real strong" ambulatory care product.

"With the merger, [Allscripts] did," Kelly said.

"The merger of Allscripts and Eclipsys represents the best of all worlds for our patients, with acute, ambulatory and post-acute solutions all coming together on one platform," said Kelly, who pointed out that the new technology would help Mercy Memorial execute on a key organizational strategy in developing an Accountable Care Organization.

For Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, Mercy's decision to go with Allsripts is the first time a hospital has selected the EHR for both the acute care and ambulatory care since the Allscripts-Eclipsys merger – "two best-of-breed, which were really only one," he said.

There are several hospitals that selected Eclipsys for the hospital side and Allscripts for the ambulatory side, and those customers, in large part, drove the merger, Tullman said.

Go-live for Mercy Memorial Hospital System is March 2012. Ambulatory rollout is planned for spring of 2011.