Children's Hospital and eClinicalWorks collaborate to implement PCHR

Sep 15 2009

Children's Hospital Boston and eClinicalWorks(R) today announced a collaboration that will enable patients who are seen at Children's ambulatory programs and in primary care practices in the Pediatric Physicians' Organization at Children's (PPOC) to aggregate health data from both sites of care into a single personally controlled health record (PCHR). This will be the first instance in which two separate health care provider organizations will feed a single PCHR from their different electronic medical record (EMR) systems - giving patients a more complete, comprehensive view of their medical information.

"We see this as a major step forward in the advancement of the ultimate goal of PCHRs and ongoing efforts to create data liquidity for patients and providers," said Daniel Nigrin, MD, MS, chief information officer at Children's. "This will exemplify a revolutionary new model for health information exchange and present combined health data to patients in a way that is easily accessible and manageable."

Ambulatory patients at Children's may view their PCHR through the hospital's patient portal, MyChildren's, which was launched earlier this year. The PCHR is powered by the Indivo system, which was developed by researchers in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) as a way to give patients access to a portable, secure digital copy of their health and wellness information. Indivo displays information from the hospital's EMR system from Cerner Corporation and gives an individual the ability to grant permissions to institutions, clinicians, researchers and other users of medical information to access their data.

"We built MyChildren's around Indivo to put patients in control of their health information and give them the opportunity to create a single, secure, unified view of their records," said Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, an attending physician in Children's Division of Emergency Medicine, CHIP faculty member and co-founder of the Indivo system. "With patients at the center of information exchange they can decide what information they want included in their record and who they want to have access to that information, be it a provider or family member. For physicians, PCHRs promise to be an integrated source of a patient's health care information, ensuring the data are in the right place at the right time - something that is oftentimes absent in today's health care environment."

Through this new collaboration, eClinicalWorks will begin to integrate its eClinicalWorks Electronic Health eXchange (eEHX) product, a solution for creating community records, with MyChildren's and to populate patients' PCHRs with information from PPOC practices. This information will be made available to patients via their existing MyChildren's account.

"Just as EMRs have transformed the way physicians practice medicine, PCHRs promise to change the medical process for patients - demystifying the process and activating individuals to become more involved in their health care," said Girish Kumar Navani, CEO and co-founder of eClinicalWorks. "eClinicalWorks has enjoyed a successful partnership with the PPOC and implementing EMRs in its member practices. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Children's and subsequently the health information that is made available to its patient families."

The PPOC partnered with eClinicalWorks in 2008 when 22% of participating providers used EMR in their practices. By October 2009, the organization expects more than 75% of its members to be up and running with EMR - the majority with eClinicalWorks - and remaining practices to be fully implemented by September 2010. In an internal survey conducted one year after the first systems went live, the majority of respondents positively rated the EMR/PM solution and agreed that it had helped improve clinical care.

"We've tried to be very thoughtful about our EMR implementation and worked closely with our members and eClinicalWorks to customize the product and incorporate the system into workflows," said Greg Young, MD, president and CEO of the PPOC. "Because of the diversity of our membership and the populations they serve, it was important that the EMR be tailored to fit patients' needs."

As part of Children's implementation of Indivo, hospital clinicians are able to view a patient's PCHR record via the hospital's Cerner electronic medical record system when granted permission by a patient. Members of the PPOC will have the same access to the PCHR through eClinicalWorks, who will embed the system into existing workflows to encourage easy access and use.

The Indivo system is built to public standards and available under an open-source license, enabling straightforward customization as well as interoperability between the system and vendor products. Developed more than a decade ago, the system is in use worldwide and has served as a reference model for PCHR providers including Dossia, Microsoft and Google.

Source: http://www.childrenshospital.org/