Vidant Health www.vidanthealth.com, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center www.wakehealth.edu, and WakeMed Health & Hospital www.wakemed.org all located in North Carolina are forming a shared services operating company. All three organizations have joined resources to more quickly innovate care models and support infrastructure to reduce costs and meet the needs of the diverse patient, consumer, and workforce populations,” reports John D. McConnell, M.D, CEO, at Wake Forest.
This relationship will not include a merger or acquisition of the three organizations. The model will provide joint support for healthcare reform including ACO development, implementation, care coordination for population health, and create business and clinical efficiencies. It will also enable more opportunities to improve supply chain management and offer select IT infrastructure and clinical protocols to the three institutions.
In addition,, the State North Carolina Health Information Exchange (NC HIE) http://nchie.org is teaming with Advanced Home Care www.advhomecare.org, one of the largest Medicare-Medicaid certified home care organizations in the Southeast, to provide HIE connectivity for nine home health branches across the state.
Soon by connecting to NC HIE, Advanced Home Care’s branches will be able to improve care transitions mostly from a hospital to a home care provider using the complete patient data available at the point-of-care.
Home care providers by connecting to NC HIE, will also be provided with Direct secure messaging and be able to engage with North Carolina Community Care Networks www.communitycarenc.com to implement advanced case management for individuals with chronic diseases plus manage medications.
In another State action, NC HIE is now partnering with Netsmart www.ntst.com to electronically connect local health departments and behavioral health organizations in an effort to streamline communication through health IT integrations. This alliance has the potential to become one of the most significant rollouts of public health connectivity to a statewide HIE in the country.
The healthcare providers in the state will be able to use the Netsmart EHR platform to connect to NC HIE’s network to query the system for patient health information, exchange patient health data between other participating providers, submit data to state public health systems, and have access to chronic disease registries.
In addition, Netsmart and CareFusion www.carefusion.com are working together to bring medication dispensing and management capabilities to behavioral healthcare provider organizations nationwide. The two companies will collaborate to integrate the medication use expertise of CareFusion with the closed-loop medication management capabilities of Netsmart.
This collaboration will help behavioral health patients, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD) community, and in addition, individuals receiving residential services will have access to advanced medication dispensing and management solutions for their specific needs.