Piedmont Healthcare and Shepherd Center recently signed on to share an Epic EHR platform in a hospital-to-hospital hosting agreement.
As part of the agreement, Piedmont will extend its Epic EHR to Shepherd Center to offer patients a single medical record between the two healthcare organizations. By utilizing the same Epic EHR platform, the organizations intend to improve care coordination between facilities and streamline transitions of care among care teams.
Shepherd and Piedmont Atlanta Hospital are already connected through an underground tunnel. This newest agreement will offer an additional level of connectivity between hospitals to improve integration and patient care delivery.
“Sharing this platform will make medical care more seamless for patients and providers by allowing for better care coordination,” said Piedmont Healthcare President and CEO Kevin Brown. “Additionally, this arrangement helps our organizations address healthcare costs by sharing the resource of a major capital investment.”
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Providers at the two Atlanta-based hospitals will also benefit from the ability to share patient health data with other Epic EHR users across the country in real-time.
“Shepherd Center is excited about the Epic Community Connect partnership with Piedmont,” said Shepherd Center President and CEO Sarah Morrison. “With more than 50 percent of our patients requiring surgical or other acute medical care procedures at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, about 80 percent of our consulting physicians being Piedmont physicians, and more than 60 percent of our top referral sources already using Epic, this partnership makes strategic sense.”
Piedmont first implemented its Epic EHR in 2012. To date, nearly two-thirds of the population has an EHR on an Epic platform.
“Shepherd believes that being on the same EHR platform with Piedmont and our referral sources will improve the continuity and quality of care for our patients, as well as improve organizational efficiencies,” said Morrison.
The EHR implementation process will begin at Shepherd Center in early 2018. The rehabilitation hospital is expected to start using Piedmont’s Epic EHR for all clinical and operational processes in February 2019.
New Supply Chain Tool Now Available Through Epic EHR
Global Healthcare Exchange recently announced its cloud-based solution connecting supply chain management to EHR systems is now available through Epic EHR to improve clinical documentation.
The supply chain tool Clinical ConneXion provides comprehensive item information for improved clinical documentation and patient billing. The tool will assist clinicians in documenting supplies at the point of use directly into clinicians’ Epic EHR systems.
The tool integrates item data directly into the EHR by leveraging the provider’s item master and other data sources to reduce one-time supplies and charge reconciliation. Simplifying documentation in this way could help increase clinical and administrative efficiency, streamline clinician workflows, and improve cost-effectiveness.
Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System is already utilizing the solution. The Louisiana-based, 1,799-bed hospital system has used Clinical ConneXion to eliminate manual entry of frequently-used supplies into the EHR. Streamlining clinical documentation has helped to improve data accuracy, increase efficiency, and boost hospital revenue.
“Having good, quality data has enabled the supply chain organization to gain the trust of our clinical teams, because they value the data we are providing,” said FMOLHS Vice President of Materials Management Bill Mosser. “That confidence means we can fulfill one of the main goals of this solution implementation — to make the product data capture process easier and quicker for clinicians.”
“We’ve achieved that, and our clinicians are now able to find and select items with confidence and speed so they can spend more time at the bedside with patients,” he added.
GHX created a data repository of FMOLHS item information that is available for documentation. Item information includes charge data needed for patient billing.
Presently, Clinical ConneXion is only available through Epic EHR.
Date: Dec 27, 2018