Sharp HealthCare-Cerner extension creates a new partnership

Sharp Healthcare is strengthening its relationship with Cerner, particularly concentrating on efforts to develop population health management capabilities.

Sharp has worked with Kansas City-based Cerner for 20 years in a traditional client-vendor relationship. Over the years, Sharp has implemented laboratory, EHR, nursing, documentation, surgical, bar coding and other software, conducting traditional negotiations each time, explains Ken Lawonn, senior vice president and CIO at Sharp.

Now, the focus is on simplifying the business side by having hospitals teaming with ambulatory providers and other stakeholders with no more one-off licensing arrangements, but to have a single licensing agreement that covers Cerner products to support population health, scheduling, registration, security, availability, data warehouse, revenue cycle, care management and analytics on a platform that also will support more than 200 employed and independent primary and specialty physicians.

This will give clinicians a single view of the patient’s record by connecting clinical and financial information across the system along with services to make the billing process easier while also improving the patient experience with billing, Lawonn says. “We are looking at driving better value and outcomes. With the Sharp medical group extending to the independent practices, it’s time to be partners and work together.”

For all of this to work, Sharp leadership such as clinical quality operational leaders had to be engaged and accept working with a vendor as a partner and take the risk together, Lawonn explains. “If we enter into a relationship, we need to get leaders to understand what doing a partnership means. It’s not a volume purchase agreement; it’s a partnership.”

Other recent health IT contracts include:

• BridgePoint Healthcare a provider of five post-acute care services in Washington, DC, and the New Orleans region that includes five hospitals, has selected HCS Interactant as its enterprise electronic health record platform to improve care, quality, operations and compliance across the organization. BridgePoint made the move after reaching the point that not having an EHR was no longer an option.

• Baptist Health System in Florida has expanded its rollout of the CORE Value Suite of clinical workflow communication and collaboration apps from TransformativeMed. The delivery system has used the apps at Wolfson Children’s Hospital since 2013 and now will expand apps to adult hospitalists at five Baptist hospitals.

• Bergen New Bridge Medical Center in Paramus, N. J., has joined the Collective Medical Network as part of a statewide effort led by the New Jersey Hospital Association to better fight the opioid epidemic. The hospital will have access to Collective Medical’s real-time, risk-adjusted event notification and care collaboration software.

• Williamson Memorial Hospital, a critical access facility in Williamson, W.Va., will use Meditech’s Expanse electronic health record under a subscription that will reduce infrastructure and capital cost burdens.