Cook Children's Health Care System, a not-for-profit, pediatric healthcare organization based in Fort Worth, Texas, is partnering with athenhealth and Microsoft to launch a new national clinical platform that aims at improving care for pediatric patients.
Cook will deploy athenahealth's electronic health record service, athenaClinicals, for its Cook Children's Physician Network, which employs 350 medical providers, and also plans to roll-out athenaCollector, its revenue cycle management service.
The organization also plans to provide primary care physicians across the country with the ability to refer patients for virtual consults with pediatric subspecialists employed by CCPN. Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth, in conjunction with Cook's purchasing organization, PedsPal, will offer preferred pricing for athenahealth's EHR and revenue cycle management services to PedsPal's 1,100 affiliated physicians spanning 22 states.
"Cook Children's Health Care System continues to demonstrate its leadership position nationally and athenahealth is thrilled to have been selected to work with them and Microsoft as they deploy our unique ambulatory EHR and revenue cycle management services that we believe will improve both the clinical and financial outcomes for its patients and physicians," said Jonathan Bush, chairman and CEO of athenahealth. "With all of our clients sharing the same national physician network, athenaNet, Cook Children's is now in a position to execute on an exciting new clinical connectivity strategy that will benefit children throughout Texas and across the country."
To bring together information from multiple sources, Cook will implement the Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) 2009, a data aggregation platform that will connect CCPN, its medical center and its health plan. The platform will allow the organization to unify inpatient, outpatient, lab, radiology and home health data, enabling clinicians to access real-time information from a single source.
"This unique venture with these proactive organizations brings a fresh solution that will be reproducible and sustainable in medical practices across the country at a very low cost," said Rick Merrill, president and CEO of Cook Children's Health Care System. "Most importantly it gives a child, regardless of their insurance or ability to pay, collaborative care and the starting point for a permanent Internet accessible medical record."
"In selecting athenahealth's clinical and revenue cycle management service our physicians will now be instantly connected on a common Web-based platform," said Merrill. "Through Amalga UIS, we will be able to integrate our medical center, physician practices, health plan and home health company. Cook Children's will be uniquely positioned to use leading edge health information technologies to advance the quality of patient care."
The collaboration between athenahealth and Microsoft will allow Cook's patients to connect with Microsoft HealthVault to store healthcare information in one security-enhanced location and share it with physicians and other healthcare providers.
"We're excited to collaborate with Cook Children's and athenahealth to implement a health IT strategy that will help improve the care and outcomes of pediatric patients across the country" said Steve Shihadeh, vice president of Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. "By unlocking and connecting the vast amounts of data across the health enterprise with Amalga UIS, we can give the professionals at Cook Children's the right information at the right time, helping them to make optimal decisions for improving the health of children."
