Mastering Data Management

Connecting community physicians is a key goal at OhioHealth

As the largest not-for-profit in Central Ohio, OhioHealth serves patients through five core and multiple affiliated hospitals, 23 health surgery centers, home health providers and a physician community of more than 2,500.

With a vision to implement a connectivity strategy for EHR deployment, ePrescribing and interoperability with community physicians, OhioHealth wanted to secure its reputation as a leader and maintain physician and patient loyalty.

Today, OhioHealth is transforming care delivery and preparing for ARRA funding with an interoperable healthcare platform that simplifies access to care, facilitates coordination of care, optimizes treatment and improves satisfaction.

Despite locked capital budgets, OhioHealth sought to execute their aggressive strategy by leveraging existing staff and resources. With a subscription-based interoperability service and vendor expertise, OhioHealth was able to enable numerous benefits for their physician network:

• Accurate identification of the patient across OhioHealth facilities via an EMPI
• Synchronization of clinical systems and repositories to create a true continuum of care record
• Registration and ordering for community physicians with OhioHealth facilities, including labs
• Results sharing via the OhioHealth Results Browser (OHB) for EMR and paper-based physicians

OhioHealth is also preparing for ARRA funding. Patient-centric care and “meaningful use” both require a focus on interoperable solutions that provide an improved understanding of patients, physicians, business partners and the relationships among them so the data associated with a patient is available to the entire care delivery team.

The goal is to achieve meaningful interoperability to deliver the right information where and when it is needed. Further, as the definition of “meaningful use” evolves over time, implementing a solid information exchange foundation will help meet changing requirements of ARRA and provide higher quality data for research and quality improvement initiatives that will build a better healthcare system.

Learn more about OhioHealth’s success.

Dr. Mrunal Shah, Vice President for Physician Technology Services at OhioHealth, will be speaking about this topic at HIMSS10. His session, Healthcare Interoperability: Achieving Meaningful Use and Beyond!” will take place on Tuesday, March 2 at 8:30 AM in room B314.