With rural hospitals striving for interoperability and enhanced patient data sharing, they have tapped Cerner’s cloud-based CommunityWorks EHR.
Cerner has added seven rural hospitals to its CommunityWorks platform, which is a cloud-based EHR platform designed to meet the unique needs of community, critical access, and specialty hospitals.
The deployment model will enable users to securely share patient clinical and financial data. CommunityWorks scales Cerner Millennium to meet the set of challenges unique to patients and care teams at smaller or rural hospitals.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of having access to the right information at the right time in order to support providers as they work to save lives,” Mitchell Clark, president of Cerner CommunityWorks, said in a statement.
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“The flexibility and scalability of this delivery model allows for use across community hospitals of varying sizes, making Cerner a right-fit for these clients and many others across the country.”
Rural hospitals and providers do not possess the same spending power as larger hospitals due to geographic location, social determinants of health, diminishing resources, and workforce shortages. These challenges negatively impact interoperability and patient care.
According to the most recent ONC data brief in late 2018, small and rural hospitals were about half as likely to share records compared to their larger counterparts. In total, only 62 percent of small hospitals shared this information.
Cerner’s CommunityWorks platform attempts to assist rural hospitals in those areas of need to ensure individuals have quality patient care.
Most recently, the EHR vendor added seven rural hospitals that fit this criteria:
Macon Community Hospital in Tennessee took part in Cerner’s first virtual EHR implementation, due to COVID-19. Stakeholders said this virtual EHR implementation worked seamlessly and Macon is now on the CommunityWorks platform because it allows the hospital to share patient information with similar health organizations, and even those that have experienced an influx of patients due to COVID-19.
In an effort to enhance interoperability between its main hospital and four health clinics, Clay County Medical Center in Kansas tapped Cerner to upgrade and be a part of its CommunityWorks program. This connection aims to better patient care for both clinicians and patients.
Next, Coulee Medical Center in Washington is migrating to Cerner’s cloud-based technology to connect its main hospital to its two rural healthcare clinics.
Staying in Washington, Cerner will also implement its cloud-based platform in Odessa Memorial Healthcare Center (OMHC). OMHC is a small acute facility and outpatient clinic. The healthcare facility aims to improve patient care by streamlining the operations process.
Opelousas General Health System in Louisiana has been a Cerner client since 2016. However, in an effort to cut costs and streamline its health IT operations between its two acute health facilities and 150 providers in that region, it has switched to the CommunityWorks platform from Cerner’s Millennium EHR platform.
Next, Pike County Memorial Hospital (PCMH), which is a critical access hospital with four clinics spanning between Missouri and Louisiana, has switched vendors to Cerner, specifically for its CommunityWorks platform. The four clinics will now be interoperable and be able to share patient data over state lines. Located just outside of St. Louis, PCMH cares for those who live in the rural parts of the two states, outside of the major city.
Finally, United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) in Texas inked a deal with Cerner to implement CommunityWorks. UMMC will utilize this platform to connect its four hospitals and four clinics on one EHR platform. While the hospital has grown in size in recent years in the Houston area, Cerner’s interoperability enticed UMMC to implement its EHR system, the medical center said.
“We are very pleased to be working with these clients and look forward to providing the technology and solutions needed to drive increased efficiency and better outcomes for our clients in times of crisis and beyond,” Clark concluded.
Source: EHR Intelligence