Alberta starts sharing data from primary care clinics

TORONTO – Orion Health, a leader in population health management and healthcare integration solutions, announced that Alberta’s Community Information Integration (CII) Program has gone live. Patient information is now flowing from an early adopter primary care clinic, powered securely from a remote cloud infrastructure by Orion Health’s Software as a Service (SaaS) in a managed private cloud setting.

There has been a large shift in Alberta and much integrated work done in this past year to create a culture of shared responsibility for the collection and sharing of health information. The goal of the Community Information Integration (CII) project is to improve continuity of care for Albertans through better sharing of patient information.

The initial focus is on making data collected in community-based primary care clinics available to more than 50,000 authorized healthcare providers through Netcare (Alberta’s Electronic Health Record).

Over time, the project will help address the information gap that can assist clinicians in avoiding unfortunate clinical outcomes due to the lack of timely, relevant information. This will help to avoid incidents such as patients falling through the cracks as they move across the care continuum from one care provider to another, as well as reducing complications and over-treatment.

Data analysts at the Business Intelligence Environment (BIE) at Alberta Health will use this information to support health system planning and quality improvement.

CII provides a more complete longitudinal patient record in Netcare by including primary care information. It closes the knowledge gap by tapping into the wealth of patient information held in local Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. Until now patient information in the primary care clinic EMRs was not readily available to providers outside of the primary care clinic location.

In the next couple of years, through the CII Program, the EMR systems in use in the majority of the community clinics in Alberta will be able to contribute patient data and EMR generated reports to Netcare.

“This program is a foundational step in the Alberta Government’s plan to support collaborative care in community health, and is hosted as a SaaS model in a private cloud,” said Gary Folker (pictured), executive vice president, Orion Health Canada.

Orion Health provides a solution that effectively utilizes sophisticated hyper converged technology and provincial assets to build a Secure SaaS Solution with agility, reduced cost and time to market. Orion can assist the province in enhancing its EHR while avoiding costly system replacements.

“From planning to implementation, the Program provides a best-practice example of how Orion Health’s Managed Private Cloud Service can be successfully deployed using a SaaS model,” said Folker.

About Orion Health

Orion Health is a leading population health management company and is one of the world’s foremost providers of electronic health records (EHRs) and healthcare integration solutions to healthcare organizations. Worldwide, Orion Health solutions are used in 30 countries by more than 300,000 clinicians. In Canada, thousands of clinicians and hundreds of provider facilities and OEM partners rely on Orion Health to facilitate data exchange between hospitals, health systems and EHRs, resulting in improved care coordination, increased cost savings and efficiencies, and enhanced quality of care. More information can be found at http://www.orionhealth.com.