With the political and legislative discussions around healthcare reform now well past, it is time for the healthcare industry to address the business aspects of reform.  What implementation processes are required and what are the unique challenges of each?  What new fiscal realities must be confronted and what new business models are required to do so? What is healthcare IT’s role in making these transitions?

Humana Chairman and CEO Mike McCallister will draw upon his own company’s experiences in discussing how nimble companies must now make the most of healthcare reform and respond to the post-reform environment with innovative, forward-looking initiatives, including with HIT.  Mr. McCallister will describe Humana’s recent partnership with WalMart to implement a low-cost co-branded prescription drug plan as one example of how companies can thrive in the post-reform world. He will discuss work being done in Humana’s new Innovation Center in the areas of mobile health; consumer-driven medicine; and insurance program initiatives that support customers’ well-being for a lifetime.

Meridian Health decided to implement an HIE to connect its six hospitals in two counties along central-coastal New Jersey. Paramount in its decision to install an HIE was its vision for integrating its facilities to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.  Meridian’s HIE recently went live with its six hospitals and long term care facilities.  The HIE will ultimately extend to clinics, physician practices, home health agencies, and other facilities to provide the technology and infrastructure for a multi-county HIE that serves over 250,000 people in Monmouth and Ocean counties.

The initial pilot program involved ten physician practices in central-coastal New Jersey.  Just one month into the program eight of the pilot practices have been found to be consistently using the system via the web, and over sixty Physicians have requested to exchange data with the HIE and their office EMR’s. Meridian sees this as a very positive response to the initial deployment of the HIE and is encouraged about its Phase 2 deployment which will include EMR-Lite and a patient portal.  In addition, Meridian’s HIE successfully integrates multiple systems, including MEDITECH, Siemens, Sunquest, MEDHOST, and others, into its broad information platform.

Ms. Weber will also discuss Meridian’s vision for full integration as well as what challenges face the system and what risk mitigation strategies have been put into place.  Ongoing mergers and acquisitions help ensure that individual clinical records will follow patients regardless of where they are seen, and the HIE, provided by ICA, will scale to accommodate numerous hospitals, IDNs, communities, counties and states. Clinicians will be able to remotely access data from across the HIE however geographically dispersed it may become. She will also discuss strategies to bring non-owned and affiliated physicians into the HIE, what benefits Meridian expects and what are the health system’s future integration plans.

Rebecca Weber

Founded in 1852 and with over 53,000 employees, Providence Health & Services is a 27 hospital, plus 100 other kinds of healthcare facilities, organization.  In this session, you will learn how Dr. Marton lead Providence’s clinical transformation by learning from and applying the best available practices faster, and more effectively to achieve truly safe, high quality care with the least waste and expense in ALL parts of the system.

Keith Marton, MD

In the implementation of HIT the potential benefits of quality of care, service and system efficiency are critical with respect to immediate, short and long-term benefits. More importantly, not all health IT value is created equal. Fully integrated health IT systems, utilizing wireless devices and mobile workstations, improve patient safety by ensuring that records are available immediately at every point of care within the system at any point in time.

This panel will focus on the different iterations of IT in the healthcare setting, specifically addressing how quality of care increases as clinical IT systems become more integrated and more fully mobilized.