Jersey Shore Hospital And Fulton County Medical Center Choose Summit Provider Exchange For Bi-Directional Physician EMR Integration

Pennsylvania hospitals partner with Summit Healthcare to support unique integration needs

Jersey Shore Hospital and Fulton County Medical Center, critical access hospitals that are members of the Pennsylvania Mountains Healthcare Alliance, haveengaged Summit Healthcare to streamline their bi-directional physician office integration efforts. They are currently implementing the Summit Provider Exchange technology solution and are currently live with LAB and RAD results outbound to physician offices.  Orders inbound from their physician offices back to JSH/FCMC will be live this summer.

Summit Provider Exchange enables seamless inboundorders integration between Jersey Shore and Fulton County and their physician practices running the Greenway EMR system.Summit Provider Exchange ensures patient matching on the front end, and if this fails, Summit Provider Exchange holds the order. Summit PE provides an intuitive end-user application able to match orders to the patient and correct any discrepancies. This enables all the benefits of streamlined integration by avoiding the pitfalls of duplicate patientsand frequent unnecessary communications back to the physician offices.

Jersey Shore and Fulton County’s implementation of the Summit Provider Exchange technology builds upon their already strong relationship with Summit Healthcare.  JSH/FCMC aligned in 2011 to choose a new healthcare information system vendor and during this time also partnered with one integration vendor to streamline their interface engine needs. 

In 2011, Meditech 6.0 was the chosen HCIS platform and Summit Healthcare the chosen integration vendor. In July 2012, the Summit Express Connect interface engine went live. Summit Express Connect provides the organizations with total control over their interfacing needs with the ability to leverage existing interfaces as well as make changes immediately to accommodate the receiving vendor systems. Their ADT (admission/discharge/transfer) interface alone has been splitten times as they connect with systems such as PACS, Dictaphone, and Home Health. The current total interfaces running through the engine today stands at 25.

Jersey Shore and Fulton County are currently in their 90 day attestation period for Meaningful Use Stage 1 and have a target completion date of June 1, 2013.   Summit Express Connect is currently routing Remote Outbreak Disease Surveillance (RODS)data to the University of Pittsburgh as part of core objectives for public health reporting.

"We chose Summit Healthcare as our integration vendor partner in 2011 during our migration to Meditech 6.0.  We had planned a phased approach, and when it came time to address our integration with our physician offices we chose to implement Summit Provider Exchange," said Christine Haas, CIO, Jersey Shore/Fulton County. "Preparing to integrate bi-directionally with a unique physician office population requires a flexible and scalable technology solution in place. Having an already established partnership with Summit Healthcare assured us that we would also have the integration services and support to meet our interconnectivity goals.”

"Summit Healthcare is pleased to continue to support Jersey Shore Hospital and Fulton County Medical Center’s integration needs and long term strategy.  Summit Provider Exchange provides organizations with the flexibility to adapt to the many needs of their physician office population.  As an existing Summit Express Connect interface engine client, the transition to supporting them in their next phase of integration was rewarding. We look forward to a long and successful partnership between our organizations.” said Ted Rossi, CEO, Summit Healthcare.

About Summit Healthcare
Summit Healthcare is the choice of hospitals and providers who want to take full control of their healthcare systems integration and information management requirements. Since 1999, we have worked to provide the industry with the most flexible integration technology with complementary tailored services and solutions. For more information, visit www.summit-healthcare.com.

About Jersey Shore Hospital and Fulton County Medical Center
Jersey Shore Hospital and Fulton County Medical Center are rural, critical access hospitals located in the state of Pennsylvania that value exceptional quality and cost effectiveness. Due to the stringent and expedient requirements of healthcare reform’s Meaningful Use (MU) mandate, the hospitals made the unprecedented decision to join forces for a shared implementation of an electronic health record system, Meditech, a leading electronic health record software vendor whose product is licensed to meet MU requirements. The hospitals have shared the EHR implementation, a cloud-based server facility, cross-functional hospital teams, IT human resources, and many third-party vendor alignments, including Summit Healthcare.