• Background: Sutter is a not-for-profit network of doctors and hospitals serving more than 100 communities in Northern California.
• Challenge: Extend the enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution to manage disparate provider data.
• Solution: Initiate® Interoperable Health manages patient and provider identities to improve customer recognition at all points of interaction, share data across systems and manage providers across the network.
• Results: Sutter achieved improved management of patient and provider identities, early error detection and foundation for future initiatives.

Sutter Health is a family of not-for-profit hospitals and physician organizations that share resources and expertise to advance health care quality. Serving more than 100 communities in Northern California, Sutter Health is a regional leader in cardiac care, cancer treatment, orthopedics, obstetrics and newborn intensive care, and is a pioneer in advanced patient safety technology. Sutter has 26 acute care hospitals as well as physician training programs, medical research facilities, long-term care centers and region-wide home health, hospice and occupation health facilities. It has relationships with approximately 5,000 physicians, 44,000 employees and 5,000 volunteers.

Sutter has a tradition of employing advanced technologies to better serve its communities and patients. For example, Sutter already has a very successful enterprise master person index (EMPI) solution from Initiate, also known in some regions as a client registry or record locator engine, managing disparate patient data across its ecosystem. Now, Sutter is poised to go further.

Realizing the Need for a Sophisticated Provider Management Solution

A rapidly evolving market for providers means that Sutter needs to focus on building physician loyalty and better serving its physicians in a more competitive industry. At the same time, the growing focus on health-information exchange and regional health information organizations (RHIOs) drove the demand for interoperability between facilities, physician offices and regions.

Additionally, patients increasingly expect that their information is available to their caregivers, especially within the same health network. Healthcare patients are consumers who make their caregiver decisions based on a number of factors, including how consumer-centric and customer-friendly the policies and processes are. Confidentiality and privacy are essential, though, as patients want only authorized caregivers to have access to their data. Patients want electronic information, but only if they can be assured that it remains secure and their privacy is protected.

Overall, Sutter wants to better promote data sharing across providers to improve patient care. Since both the patient and the provider populations are increasingly mobile, access must be available throughout the network, in real time and on demand. Enabling clinical results to be routed quickly and seamlessly to the appropriate community independent physicians associations (IPAs) and physicians is an important part of this goal. By deploying Initiate Interoperable Health, Sutter is empowered to achieve all these goals while also de-duplicating provider data and improving relationships with providers which can increase referrals.

Kristen Wilson-Jones, vice president, Data and Online Services at Sutter, explained, “There is increasing pressure on care delivery organizations (CDOs) to keep up with physician and patient demands. Leading hospitals are starting to see the creation of a proprietary health information exchange (HIE) as a way to keep up with that demand © 2009 Initiate Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. SUCCESS STORY | 2 Sutter Health and, in turn, increase brand loyalty among referring physicians and patients. Initiate Interoperable Health has been an integral component in Sutter’s ability to deliver in this competitive healthcare environment.”

Indeed, it is vital to Sutter’s future growth to have a trusted, single view of its patients, no matter where in the Sutter network they may go for treatment. Sutter required an EMPI that could link its entire, vast network with accuracy and flexibility to help with patient safety, customer satisfaction, and more efficient business operations. The solution also needed to eliminate redundancy and duplication across business platforms. Most important, Sutter needed the flexibility to integrate its EMPI with existing systems from several different vendors, as well as with future technology.

Initiate^® Software: Seamlessly Managing Patients and Providers

On the patient side, Sutter is managing information from 26 hospitals and 12 medical foundations, representing approximately 14.5 million demographic patient records. Because Initiate software is integrated with all of Sutter’s revenue cycle and registration systems,inpatient and outpatient data is managed in the EMPI across the geographically diverse region.

Instead of repeatedly interviewing patients for demographic information, integration with the patient registration systems enables each affiliate’s registration staff to instantly access a patient’s secure demographic record through the EMPI. This solution helps minimize creation of duplicate electronic patient records while eliminating duplicate clinical charts. By providing clean data regarding all tests ordered by all Sutter-affiliated clinicians for a particular patient, the solution also helps eliminate duplicate tests and procedures that, if performed twice within a certain number of days, may not be paid by Medicare or some insurance providers. Having accurate and readily available customer data in this case supports Sutter’s work toward limiting healthcare costs today and in the future. Patient safety also is enhanced by ready access to previously recorded data.

With a successful EMPI from Initiate Systems in place, Sutter decided it was time to tackle the provider side of its network.

Provider information is fed to the provider database from many sources, including the Sutter Health Enterprise Warehouse. Currently, Sutter is using Initiate software to manage 70,000 provider records, creating composite views for each unique provider.

Sutter also has an array of systems consuming the information linked by Initiate. The Sutter Health Enterprise Warehouse and a physician portal both actively consume provider information on a continuous basis. Midas Plus – a clinical reporting tool for managing cases, quality and risk – provides reporting for both patients and providers, using the available data to provide status updates. Historically, Midas Plus had been limited because it requires a single provider record for evaluation. However, with Initiate software, Sutter’s disparate patient and provider records can be compiled into a single “golden record” for any given patient or provider, enabling greater analysis and reporting. Additionally, Sutter’s data is being consumed by Apollo (a cardiology information system), Misys Radiology Information System and the Emageon PACS.

Overall, Sutter Health is well on its way to achieving a robust integrated delivery network to help improve patient and provider safety and satisfaction while laying a solid foundation for future interoperability initiatives and data exchanges.

Initiate and Sutter working as a team

Sutter is on the road to delivering even safer, more efficient patient care while improving relationships with their providers. As a result of the robust capabilities of the Initiate solution, anticipated savings in manpower, time and dollars will be significant through enterprise-wide linking of patient records. Some of the legal and risk management issues that permeate the healthcare landscape, such as compliance with HIPAA regulations, may also be minimized, thanks to the quick availability of accurate and secure patient information.

Looking to the future, the integration between Initiate Interoperable Health and Sutter’s Epic registration system will soon give Sutter additional capabilities to look up existing records and prevent duplicates at the point of service. Once this integration has been fully implemented, registration staff will have more access to the relevant patient records they need, so the entire Sutter team is enabled to deliver the best possible patient care. Additionally, Sutter is well poised to further share data in a health information exchange (HIE) or regional health information organization (RHIO) in northern California or beyond. By better managing and understanding its own data, Sutter is enabled to share that data beyond its borders.

To learn more about how Initiate Systems can help you solve your health information exchange challenges, visit www.Initiate.com/healthcare.