Innovative teams across Penn Medicine are constantly striving to advance medicine with new treatments and technology and to reimagine health care delivery with improved practices and platforms. But sometimes, the most exciting and impactful changes come from breaking down barriers and siloes and working alongside competitors.
At the 2020 American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Informatics Conference in May, Joel S. Betesh, MD, medical informatics officer at Pennsylvania Hospital, and J.T. Howell, MD, associate chief medical information officer for Ambulatory Electronic Health Records (EHR) for the Health System, took to the virtual podium to discuss the ways in which Penn Medicine has developed a novel, collaborative model with eight health systems across the region that use the same EHR system.
As their presentation noted, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” They explained how medical information and informatics leaders from these institutions have joined forces to identify areas of mutual interest, such as leveraging the EHR to share clinical records, medication lists, and sexual orientation and gender identity data. Together, they also deal with new and impending state regulations and assess the efficacy of future EHR features, like real-time prescriptions benefits. These fruitful partnerships also paid off significantly during the pandemic with regard to work flows and the exchange of COVID-19 results.
“You can see how easy it is for a patient to have a primary care provider in one health system and see a specialist at another,” Betesh explained. While it may seem to be in a hospital’s best interest to avoid aligning with rivals, “the reality is that when the same patient obtains care from adjacent health systems, it is in the patient’s best interest and everyone’s best interest to work together to deliver care as seamlessly as possible.”