A network of community health centers serving more than 75,000 underserved and migrant workers in Iowa and Nebraska will be implementing a new practice management system from GE Healthcare.
InConcertCare, an Urbandale, Iowa-based nonprofit organization established in 1997 to improve the delivery of healthcare services throughout the two states, will replace its existing PM system with GE Healthcare’s Centricity Practice for Community Health Centers. The integrated clinical and financial solution will help automate the care delivery process at InConcertCare’s 12 community health centers and connect more than 140 providers to clinical and revenue cycle management tools.
"We are building on our decade of success with a common practice management system, dental clinical information system and our newer experience with a registry that allows quality and health outcomes data collection for this population-based system," said Ted Boesen, InConcertCare’s CEO, in a press release. "Centricity EMR is the next step in achieving our network’s goal of operating a paperless, fully-integrated system, and will provide us a powerful tool to meet our population health management objectives and federal reporting requirements.”
Boesen said the network is using a $2 million federal grant to deploy Centricity, leveraging such features as integrated scheduling, electronic messaging, care alerts for physicians, real-time decision support, drug-disease information checks, e-prescribing and claims processing services to help improve management of the revenue cycle. Centricity will also allow the network to quickly adapt to any health information exchanges in the future.
“We are now seeing exponential growth in the adoption of EMRs by community health centers, which is clearly a step toward improving access to care – and the quality of care – for underprivileged and underserved populations across the country," said Jim Corrigan, vice president and general manager of Barrington, Ill.-based GE Healthcare IT. "We are proud to have been selected as a partner by InConcertCare and are committed to supporting their continued success as they leverage the full potential of HIT to improve health outcomes while increasing operational and clinical efficiencies."
According to GE officials, more than 120 federally qualified health centers are using Centricity’s EMR and PM systems, including nine centers announced Tuesday. While helping the centers to digitize their clinical operations, they said, the software platform also enables them to improve their RCM capabilities and make better use of limited funds.