Electronic Health Reporter

Cerner Corp. and Intermountain Healthcare announced today  the implementation of iCentra, a model electronic health record (EHR), practice management and revenue cycle system, at two Intermountain hospitals and 24 clinics across northern Utah. Intermountain will use a regional deployment strategy to bring all acute care facilities, ambulatory clinics, affiliated practices and business offices live on iCentra in 2015 and 2016.

The iCentra implementation began Feb. 21 at Logan Regional and Bear River Valley hospitals and surrounding Intermountain clinics throughout Box Elder and Cache counties.

“The launch of iCentra at multiple locations is a milestone event for Intermountain as we create a model system for health care delivery that focuses on providing the best possible care for our patient population at a sustainable cost,” said Marc Probst, chief information officer and vice president for Intermountain Healthcare.

iCentra was implemented 15 months after Cerner and Intermountain announced their multi-year strategic partnership. Cerner’s open architecture and edge development models for innovation, paired with Intermountain’s best practice standards and focus on quality improvement, enabled the implementation.

For example, iCentra integrates Intermountain’s industry-recognized Care Process Models, which includes evidence-based best practice guidelines and workflows tools that blend the guidelines into care delivery as a shared baseline. These decision support tools help health care organizations identify and track medical costs, services, and outcomes specific to a care process.

“Through our shared vision, we believe Cerner and Intermountain have created a powerful collaborative to shape the future of health care in our country,” said Neal Patterson, chairman and CEO, Cerner. “This implementation is only the beginning of many chapters with Intermountain.”

Demonstrating the benefits of a truly integrated health care system and the parallel strategies of two organizations, iCentra is the result of collaboration among Intermountain and Cerner associates, as well as input from 400 Intermountain physicians. Teams used agile development principles to design and configure the system in six-week cycles while both companies added intellectual property that makes iCentra more unique than other fully integrated EHR systems in the market.

“The key to our approach was to focus on engaging physicians, nurses and other clinical leaders early in the project to develop the content and configuration in iCentra,” said Mark Briesacher, MD, Intermountain Medical Group Senior Administrative Medical Director and iCentra Executive Lead.

This methodology differentiates iCentra from other implementations by creating an environment and operational structure for continuous improvement beyond the first go-live so that once the implementation is complete across all hospitals and systems, iCentra will become a true learning environment. This includes multifaceted teams of super users, physician coaches, informaticists, and clinical leadership.

As part of their multi-year strategic partnership, Cerner and Intermountain will continue to work with physicians, clinicians, and business teams to improve iCentra. The work is designed to enable future innovations around activity-based costing and improve the patient room of the future.