News Feature | December 7, 2015

Geisinger Partners With Cerner On Population Management

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

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Geisinger announces it will use the HealtheIntent Population Health Management Platform across disparate EHRs.

Geisinger Health System has announced it will adopt Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform to further extend Geisinger’s data-driven population health capabilities. “Leveraging our vast stores of data is one way to demonstrate our commitment to ensuring Geisinger’s patients benefit from leading-edge advances in healthcare,” said Dr. David Feinberg, CEO of Geisinger. “Implementing HealtheIntent as part of our UDA will afford our providers unparalleled access to data and allow them to pursue new and exciting data analytics opportunities that will improve patient experience and patient outcomes.”

The cloud-based platform is accessible anywhere, anytime by the physicians who use it. “While EHRs have successfully digitized some healthcare information, convenient and personalized care will only be achieved through integration of data from sources within and outside the EHR platforms — it is about time for the healthcare industry to begin taking advantage of cloud-based big data analytics, like HealtheIntent to manage patients,” said Dr. Alistair Erskine, chief clinical informatics officer at Geisinger.

Healthcare IT News, spoke with Nicholas Marko, MD, Geisinger’s chief data officer and a practicing neurosurgeon who was a key stakeholder in the decision to use this solution for population management. Marko cited three chief factors in the choice of the Cerner system:

  1. it is built on a modern data architecture
  2. it works on data from many sources seamlessly
  3. Cerner is open to being a development partner

“We have the same challenges and interests that other organizations do with the added piece that we are both a provider and a payer system,” Marko offered. “We have lots of different ways to look at our patients. Our real challenge was to figure out new, interesting, useful, and productive ways to take all of the information we have from lots of different places and put it together into one or more systems where we can really get that kind of quick and easy and also comprehensive and valuable view into our patients and the people we take care of,” said Marko.