Addressing the Senate Finance Committee on the Hill July 15th, William A. Bornstein, MD, PhD, CMO and Chief Quality Officer at Emory Healthcare, told the Committee about Emory Healthcare’s successful efforts to care for chronically ill patients and how technology continues to play a very important role in coordinating care for patients in medical homes.
Data sharing among providers is an important element in care coordination. Emory is investing heavily in its own health information exchange (the Emory HIE) to connect the Emory EMR with other EMRs in hospitals and physician practices. Over the past year, Emory has begun “on-boarding” other EMRs in private practices in their network to the HIE.
As Dr. Bornstein mentioned, “Traditional EMRs do not effectively aggregate and display population-level reporting with data from disparate sources. It will be necessary for the network to invest over $5,600,000 over the next six years to gain the capacity to use data generated across our network to manage our attributed population.
Just last February, Emory became the first provider to join the Georgia Health Information Network (GaHIN). Today, most major provider systems in Georgia have become GaHIN members or are in the queue to connect.
GaHIN a private, nonprofit serves as a hub for Georgia providers to share patient data securely with one another. The network connects health-related agencies, service area HIEs, hospitals, clinics, physician practices, long-term care facilities, payers, labs, pharmacies, and academic health centers.
To continually improve the technology needed, research is continually ongoing at Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences IT program. The researchers are doing further research on the Electronic Biomedical Interactive Resource Tool (eBIRT). This tool will provide information on research-related resources available at participating institutions across the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
The researchers are also working on the Laboratory Information Management System initiative to establish a central laboratory system to provide service for ACTSI/Emory research laboratories.
This system will facilitate the tracking and management of specimens, laboratory inventories, and reagent ordering, the management of laboratory and QC data, acquisition of data directly from instruments plus laboratory results data. In addition, the initiative will create a virtual network of research laboratories to enable querying of sample types across the laboratories.
A successful project at Emory is the Emory Healthcare Network (EHN) in place to support physicians, improve care coordination, and enhance quality outcomes and control costs for patients and the community.
As Dr Bornstein explained receiving payment for services is a challenge and solutions are needed. “The EHN is Emory’s ACO which enables Emory to contract with payers in ways that liberate the university from the constraints of fee-for-service and help move towards better alignment of needs among patients, providers, and payers. It costs in the range of $6 million to $10 million annually to run the EHN.”
To move coordinated care in medical homes forward, Emory has created their own patient-centered medical home called the “Emory Patient-Centered Primary Care Clinic”. In developing the medical home, physicians need to learn new population management skills such as disease registry management and collaborative goal setting.