InterSystems HealthShare to Improve Patient Experience, Coordinated Care at North Shore-LIJ Health System
The North Shore-LIJ Health System, one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, has selected InterSystems, a global leader in software for connected care, to implement a secure technology infrastructure that will connect all of the health system’s clinical and business systems.
InterSystems HealthShare® is a strategic informatics platform that will provide connectivity among all providers across the North Shore-LIJ Health System – including hospitals, physician practices, patient-centered medical homes, call centers, and community service programs – with new capabilities such as smart message routing, proactive alerts, advanced work flows and real-time active analytics that will help improve the quality of care and the patient experience.
North Shore-LIJ’s investment in this initiative, valued at $25 million over the next several years, is essential to meeting the technology challenges posed by the Affordable Care Act, as the healthcare industry makes the transition from fee-based services to more accountable and coordinated care. These challenges include consolidating disparate clinical and administrative systems, integrating nontraditional care venues such as call centers, and capturing all clinical information from high-volume data sources such as mobile medical devices and home monitoring systems. In this emerging healthcare model, interoperability among diverse systems becomes a strategic imperative.
HealthShare will give care providers a secure and comprehensive view of patient information across the entire healthcare continuum, spanning North Shore-LIJ’s electronic health record (EHR) system being integrated at 15 hospitals, three skilled-nursing facilities, 12 emergency departments, approximately 400 outpatient and physician practices, and in the offices of community-based physicians affiliated with the health system.
In addition to clinical information exchange, the HealthShare platform will enable smart delivery of event-triggered alerts and critical information to caregivers in their preferred work flows. For example, when a high-risk expectant mother is admitted to an emergency room, the system will automatically notify her obstetrician and primary care doctor, while providing the emergency room physicians with instant access to her complete medical history across multiple care providers. As a result, caregivers will work with complete and up-to-date information.
HealthShare’s advanced real-time active analytics will also identify critical gaps in care, such as missed appointments or unfilled prescriptions, and enable tracking of patients’ activities and timely data-informed action – at every point of care.
“One of the key principles of Accountable Care – and good medical care in general – is that providers will preemptively address the wellness and disease management needs of their patients,” according to Michael Oppenheim, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at North Shore-LIJ. “InterSystems provides the tools to automatically detect and notify providers of gaps in care or clinical changes even when the patient is not right in front of the provider. This will enable our providers to proactively intervene and should dramatically improve the health and well being of the people that we serve.”
“This is one of the most strategic IT investments North Shore-LIJ has ever undertaken,” said John Bosco, Chief Information Officer at North Shore-LIJ. “We had already experienced InterSystems technology through our participation in Healthix, the regional health information organization in New York, which is based on HealthShare as its strategic interoperability platform. HealthShare’s proven track record among five statewide health information exchanges as well as leading health systems and hospitals worldwide gave us confidence in the platform.
“We are one of New York State’s largest employers with a workforce of more than 46,000, and HealthShare’s modern architectural design will give us the agility we need as we continue to grow. This platform will position us strongly for the future, providing the scalability, reliability and performance we need, without requiring anyone in our care community to replace their technology investments or disrupt familiar processes and work flows,” Mr. Bosco added.
The project has an aggressive timeline that reflects the extraordinary rate of healthcare evolution. The first phase, to be completed in six months, includes enabling technologies such as the HealthShare composite health record, clinical viewer and the patient index, identification automation and registries. Within the first year, advanced capabilities such as real-time active analytics and more complex business processes will be implemented, for use in cases such as 30-day patient readmission notifications and bundled payment patient notifications.
This rapid pace of delivery will be aided by J2 Interactive, which will serve as the implementation partner for this initiative. Lou LaRocca, president and CEO of J2, noted, “We have been an InterSystems implementation partner since 2004 and we are pleased to be part of the core team that will help North Shore-LIJ launch a scalable, resilient and fault-tolerant backbone that will improve care coordination and communication in an increasingly complex healthcare environment.”