Jeff Townsend is executive vice president and chief of staff at Cerner. Townsend oversees Cerner’s institute relationships including Intermountain Healthcare.
In 2013, Cerner signed a multi-year partnership with Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare to deploy Cerner’s electronic health record (EHR) solutions and revenue cycle technology across Intermountain’s hospitals and clinics.
The agreement resulted in iCentra, an integrated (EHR), revenue cycle and practice management system.
Q: What is iCentra and how will it change health care?
A: iCentra is the name of the integrated EHR, practice management, and revenue cycle system Intermountain Healthcare and Cerner are configuring together. The vision for iCentra is to transform health care by leveraging new technologies and approaches, making it more effective and affordable. iCentra will further Intermountain’s efforts to become a model health system for current and future generations. By implementing the system in all Intermountain hospitals and clinics, Intermountain will be better prepared for a future where clinicians can focus even more on providing the best possible care for patients.
Q: What are the benefits of iCentra?
A: the open architecture of iCentra has allowed us the opportunity to design and integrate a full suite of solutions, delivered across more than 300 unique healthcare roles. From the beginning of the project, a workflow based approach to model the breadth of healthcare was embedded into the day to day design of the system. This created what we now refer to as the iCentra Model System. For both Cerner and Intermountain, it was an opportunity to comprehensively configure the entire platform representing the breadth of healthcare all at once. This was both a challenge and an opportunity. At the challenge level, it requires a much more sophisticated level of collaboration across the decision makers of the organization to design highly integrated care delivery models. On the opportunity side, covering the breadth and depth of healthcare in a single ecosystem has the potential to produce a significantly different system that is much more connected and contextual.
As an example, when you have a patient with a particular health concern, iCentra, as a learning system, adapts to the needs of the care team. This means it can flex contextually to the moment – this includes the technology being aware of the patient, his or her condition, the care providers in the room, and the delivery action that is about to occur. It tries to anticipate the physician’s next action and pushes important information and alerts to him or her as the environment and information precision changes. We’re excited about what we have done through our collaboration to date and the amount of innovation we’ve introduced together over the last year. It’s just the foundation of creating a much smarter, more intelligent, and unparalleled system.
Q: How was iCentra developed differently than other HIT solutions?
A: We applied both a different method of design and a different type of engagement or participation from the very beginning. We had more than 400 physicians involved in the project since the very early days. A piece of the methodology was to position this as a change management project, not an I.T. project. This wasn’t about putting in plumbing; this was about preparing the organization for a systemic change. So, large numbers of staff across the state of Utah were presented with early versions of iCentra. We would demo what the system looked like, they would give their feedback, and we’d make those changes. Over the past year, we’ve gone through 4-to-6-week agile deployment cycles to make modifications, get feedback and repeat. Seeing your input come to life and how that gets represented in a digital experience becomes an empowering part of the change management approach.
And, I’d say the early feedback from initiating this size and scale of a system has a lot to do with the involvement from virtually every department from across the organization. Business and clinical leaders took ownership of the project from the beginning. It is very important that the ownership and next wave of priorities is driven outside of IT.
Q: How will Cerner and Intermountain continue to innovate in the HIT space?
A: This goes back to the original charter when Intermountain Healthcare was formed. The founding Board of Trustees asked leadership to establish Intermountain as a model system. It’s unique when an organization thinks that broadly and builds that mentality into their culture.
When we started our relationship 15 months ago, we intended to take what we learned here as a kind of living lab and make that learning available to other healthcare organizations in and out of the United States.
We created a methodology that allows us to continue to make changes at the pace we made over the last year before we went live.
We can continue to roll out iCentra to the rest of Intermountain’s hospitals and clinics and improve while we go. At least for me, that’s the big metric on whether we tapped into the next-generation methodology that allows you to stay current, as well as learn and innovate. Not just at the system level, but at the people and process level. Most organizations would go live on a new system, freeze everything for the next year to three years, and not make any changes while they rollout so they could optimize for deployment. Healthcare doesn’t stand still long enough for that model to continue to be effective.
All of this important work is creating a foundation for Intermountain and Cerner to focus on the future of healthcare and enabling true activity-based costing needed when caring for populations.
