Partners Launches Major Data Integration Project

Partners HealthCare is launching a major data integration project which should bring it closer to its goal of implementing a single EMR across the entire Partners network over the next few years.

About a year ago, Partners announced that it would be integrating all electronic health information management into a single system that would serve the whole organization by 2017.

The Partners eCare initiative, massive by any standards, is the largest program of its kind in the history of the institution, Healthcare IT News reports. eCare’s mission is to enable systems that offer “one patient, one record, one team, one Partners statement.” eCare is ultimately intended to achieve some transformative goals, including redesigning patient care models and advancing population health management.

For this part of the project, partner InterSystems will replace several existing integration engines and enable the health system to consolidate its financial and clinical technologies into a single EMR platform, Healthcare IT News says. In doing so it will be working closely with Epic, Partners’ EMR vendor.

This is only the latest InterSystems deal for Partners, which uses the vendor’s Cache database for its existing EMR and hundreds of apps used by thousands of clinicians throughout its network, HIN notes. Partners also uses InterSystems’ Ensemble rapid integration software, which has enabled integration of its library of services and applications.

As this is going on, Partners’ division The Center for Connected Health is breaking ground on delivering new forms of patient care outside of standard medical settings. One experiment going on now is an effort in which Partners channels remotely-collected patient health data in its EMR. As of June, the Center’s remote monitoring database stored over 1.2 million patient vital signs.

With the Center working to change how and where care is delivered, and Partners corporate building an EMR capable (presumably) of making some use of this data, it’ll be interesting to see the end result. To date, EMRs have not been equipped to integrate remote monitoring data smoothly — but perhaps Partners will pull it off.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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