CHICAGO and KANSAS CITY, Mo, April 10, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Advocate Health Care and Advocate Physician Partners have extended their long-term partnership with global health information technology supplier Cerner to work toward advanced health care, lowered costs and improved patient and clinician experience. The enhanced agreement will combine Cerner's population health and electronic health record (EHR) technologies with Advocate's proven population health people and process expertise.
Advocate Physician Partners as a Solution Design Partner
Under the seven-year agreement, Advocate Physician Partners will work with Cerner as a solution and design partner to develop and evolve the next era of population health management solutions to better serve organizations and communities. This partnership is a continuation of the existing agreement to further advance clinical integration and population health management capabilities.
"Advocate and Cerner have a shared vision for advanced population health management. By combining Cerner's most innovative technology with Advocate's industry-leading Clinical Integration Program focused on value-based care, we are leveraging big data in real-time to proactively address population risk," said Mike Englehart, president, Advocate Physician Partners.
Advocate Physician Partners will benefit from the relationship through the use of HealtheRegistries™. The solution, built on the HealtheIntent™ platform, provides a comprehensive view of patient activity across the care continuum by aggregating clinical, financial and operational data.
Advocate plans to release Cerner's community-based care management solution, HealtheCare℠, this summer. Both HealtheRegistries and HealtheCare will be demonstrated in Cerner's booth (913) at HIMSS15. Advocate Physician Partners will continue to deploy the latest population health innovations developed with Cerner as they manage a larger number of lives in the communities they serve.
"Advocate Physician Partners is an industry leader in clinical integration and improving health outcomes across the care continuum for the last decade," said Brad Carey, vice president of population health, Cerner. "Partnering with the largest commercial ACO allows Cerner to take the next step in advancing the health and care of entire populations, and identify and address risks before hospitalization."
Extended Remote Hosting
Advocate Health Care will extend its remote hosting relationship with Cerner to provide high availability of Cerner's EHR to its hospitals through June, 2024. The new agreement includes access to more of Cerner's service offerings and will allow Advocate to continue enjoying high system reliability and availability for their clinicians who use the Cerner EHR.
"Seven years ago, we made the decision to outsource our Cerner operations to the Cerner Remote Hosting facility in Kansas City. It is a decision that has paid back dividends in terms of service, expansion and cost savings," said Bruce D. Smith, senior vice president and chief information officer of Information Systems, Advocate Health Care. "Our user base has continued to grow over the years while we have maintained our high reliability with excellent response times."
Advocate-Cerner Collaboration
The existing Advocate-Cerner collaboration team will continue to innovate advanced analytics and predictive models. The collaboration team will continue to build upon Cerner's HealtheIntent platform by aggregating, normalizing and structuring clinical, financial and operational data across the care continuum. This intelligent content will be integrated into the Cerner EHR workflow.
"Our strategic partnership with Cerner around population health and big data has allowed us to build one of the most impressive data warehouses of clinical, claims and demographic data across the continuum of care," said Rishi Sikka, MD, senior vice president of Clinical Transformation, Advocate Health Care. "We will continue our work by leveraging this data to continue building advanced analytics and predictive models that we expect to positively impact the outcomes and cost of the populations we serve."
About Advocate Health Care
Advocate Health Care, named among the nation's Top 5 large health systems based on quality by Truven Analytics, is the largest health system in Illinois and one of the largest health care providers in the Midwest. Advocate operates more than 250 sites of care, including 12 hospitals that encompass 11 acute care hospitals, the state's largest integrated children's network, five Level I trauma centers (the state's highest designation in trauma care), three Level II trauma centers, one of the area's largest home health care companies and one of the region's largest medical groups. Advocate Health Care trains more primary care physicians and residents at its four teaching hospitals than any other health system in the state. As a not-for-profit, mission-based health system affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United Church of Christ, Advocate contributed $661 million in charitable care and services to communities across Chicagoland and Central Illinois in 2013.
About Advocate Physician Partners
Advocate Physician Partners (APP) brings together more than 4,800 physicians who are committed to improving health care quality, safety and outcomes for patients across Chicagoland and Central Illinois.
Formed as a care management collaboration with Advocate Health Care, APP is a leader in population health management and has garnered wide-spread national recognition for its innovative clinical integration program. Physicians and their patients benefit from a coordinated approach to addressing patient health needs across the continuum—ensuring care is delivered at the right place and at the right time. This results in more efficiency, improved health outcomes and significant cost savings for patients.
With over 609,000 patients in value-based agreements, APP was named the largest ACO in the U.S. by Modern Healthcare.
About Cerner
Cerner's health information technologies connect people, information and systems at more than 18,000 facilities worldwide. Recognized for innovation, Cerner solutions assist clinicians in making care decisions and enable organizations to manage the health of populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help health care organizations manage revenue, as well as a wide range of services to support clients' clinical, financial and operational needs. Cerner's mission is to contribute to the improvement of health care delivery and the health of communities. On February 2, 2015, Cerner Corporation acquired substantially all of the assets, and assumed certain liabilities, of the Siemens Health Services business from Siemens AG. (Nasdaq:CERN). For more information about Cerner, visit cerner.com, read our blog at cerner.com/blog, connect with us on Twitter at twitter.com/cerner and on Facebook at facebook.com/cerner.
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