Leading Children’s Health System to Leverage athenahealth’s
Electronic Health Record Service and the Microsoft Amalga Unified
Intelligence System to Support Extended Connectivity Strategy
Cook Children’s Health Care System today announced they are
collaborating with athenahealth, Inc. and Microsoft Corporation to
implement information technology solutions designed to improve care and
outcomes for pediatric patients nationwide.
Cook Children’s is listed in US NEWS & World Report as one of
the top children’s hospitals in the nation and in the Modern
Healthcare top 100 Integrated Health Care Networks. Cook Children’s
currently supports more than 60 pediatric medical offices and specialty
clinics throughout Texas. It also conducts over 258,000 specialty clinic
visits, 472,000 pediatric office visits and 99,000 emergency department
visits annually.
In 2008, Cook Children’s established the bold promise of improving the
health of every child in its region through the prevention and treatment
of illness, disease and injury. It then set out to find the tools and
the resources that could help in fulfilling that promise and believes
athenahealth and Microsoft are ideal partners.
Cook Children’s has selected athenahealth’s 2008 CCHIT® Certified
electronic health record (EHR) service, athenaClinicalsSM,
for its Cook Children’s Physician Network (CCPN) which employs
approximately 350 medical providers. Cook Children’s will also be
implementing athenahealth’s revenue cycle management service,
athenaCollectorSM.
While a highly functional EHR is an important improvement, to maximize
patient care, an organization must bring together all of the information
it has from multiple resources at the point of care for each child. To
achieve this unprecedented leap forward, Cook Children’s will implement
the Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) 2009. This
strategic data aggregation platform will span Cook Children’s multiple
lines of business, including CCPN, its Medical Center, and its Health
Plan. With Amalga UIS, Cook Children’s will be able to unify inpatient,
outpatient, lab, radiology and home health data, enabling clinicians to
access real-time information from a single source.
Additionally, through this collaborative effort with athenahealth and
Microsoft, Cook Children’s will enable its patients to connect with
Microsoft HealthVault, an online personal health platform that allows
individuals to store their health information, or their whole family’s
health information, in one security-enhanced location. Using
HealthVault, consumers have complete control over their electronic
health data and can give permission to their physicians and other
healthcare providers to view it and give input, supporting more informed
decisions around patient care.
As planning with athenahealth and Microsoft progressed, it became clear
to Cook Children’s that through athenahealth, these same tools could be
made available to physicians nationally. Through athenahealth, Cook
Children’s has found a way to allow primary care physicians across the
country to electronically refer their patients for virtual consults with
the pediatric subspecialists employed by CCPN.
