The Premier healthcare alliance has joined hands with IBM to combine health information from across hospitals and other healthcare sites. This move is expected to help more than 2,400 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare sites.
To get insight, measure and improve the health of the population, IBM and Premier will develop an industry-first technology platform. Apart from reducing the overuse of procedures, readmissions, unnecessary ER visits and hospital-acquired conditions, this will support hospitals, doctors and other health providers in working together to enhance patient safety, the company stated.
The IBM Health Integration Framework, which is used in this partnership, is a software platform based on industry standards. It supports IBM and IBM Business Partner solutions and applications for providers, health plans and life sciences organizations.
“Without access to this data, the majority of providers simply cannot offer the type of accountable care that regulations requireand patients deserve,” stated Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM healthcare and life sciences, “Our work with Premier will help clinical, administrative and financial decision makers easily and efficiently access information that could improve care. This is a necessity to transform healthcare delivery, bending the cost curve while improving the quality of care.”
The patients can now be sure that they will get the most effective treatment possible, said the company.
Apart from this, participants in Premier's Accountable Care Implementation Collaborative will leverage the model to exchange data. Doctors and other medical personnel will now get relevant, meaningful and real-time information at the point of care delivery to make better decisions about how to treat each patient, the company stated in a press release.
In August 2010, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) prioritized care provider activities at the point of care as well as selectively provided bedside access to digitized patient information to authorized hospital staff depending on the type of interaction that each staff member needs to have with a patient. The hospital did all this in partnership with IBM, the company stated in a press release.
Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
