LAS VEGAS – Parkview Health in Northeast Indiana has created a path for rural patients in 23 counties to benefit from “a single story of care,” according to David Winn, vice president of Parkview Community Connect.
His presentation focused on lessons learned after 13 years of growing “a business within a business.”
The non-profit healthcare organization has created an electronic health records system sharing program that provides web-enabled access to Epic at more than 400 rural hospitals and clinics.
“We want them to not only survive, but we want them to thrive,” he said Tuesday as he kicked off his education session at the HIMSS25 global conference and exhibition.
“We just have to make sure that we’re not losing any money when we do it.”
By hosting the full EHR, the 1,300-bed, non-profit health system is handling all the overhead that’s coming in.
“Our customers only have to bear a small portion of that burden,” he told attendees interested in learning how to bridge the rural divide and improve access, population health management and patient experiences in their regions.
Rural hospitals and clinics face several rate-limiting factors that bar them from accessing high-quality EHRs from minimal resources and technology to geographic isolation and financial burdens, he noted.
Parkview selected Epic in 2011 for its EHR, and by 2013 its board decided that establishing an EHR sharing program could improve continuity of care, population health management and more throughout the region.
Parkview’s customers have access to their secure data and benefit from reporting across a shared system. Their patients also like being able to schedule all their appointments and access their health information in one place, WInn said.
But sharing an EHR, or switching to a shared one that is both complete and comprehensive, is no small leap of transformation for either organization.
“If you’ve done these implementations before, you know it’s a huge undertaking for these community hospitals,” Winn said.
“It’s not just dropping in an EHR. Once it’s in, things are going to change for those folks. We try to make this process as positive and experience as possible.”
“Conversion and archiving is really a huge component to making this happen,” he said.
For example, when a rural system signs on and data begins to move – either through a third party or manually – existing claims do not move over.
Clinically, the rural healthcare organization will step away from a legacy system once they are up and running, but claims continue until they are completed with new claims entered into Epic and any required reporting married on the back end.
“I’m fortunate enough to have several different options when it comes to working with what tools are we going to be using,” Winn said.
“But we try to pick vendors that we can continue to work with that understand what we’re doing – that want to help us have a low-cost entry for this.”
Rural customers have data in “all different formats, storage and archiving,” he noted.
“When we’re moving things over in a discrete fashion from the legacy system over into Epic, we’re bringing over the CCD documentation right off the bat. That’s the easiest thing to do, and there’s a few other elements,” he explained.
Epic provides tools that help Parkview with the extraction of customers’ data extraction, but together the healthcare organizations have to decide how much information is needed, and if some data should be archived in active storage for image and document management.
Some customers may opt for manual extraction, and Parkview will help them plan how that will happen, Winn said.
Then, there could be enhancements customers may want to make.
“The only thing we have between us as an agreement is the fact that we’re sharing the EHR,” Winn explained. “That’s it. Everything about the business becomes strictly business. They are independent.”
Throughout the process and afterward, Parkview provides resources and training, supports its customers if there is a data breach, and consults on enhancements.
“We want to make sure that we’re meeting the organization’s needs.”
Pricing the health system’s EHR sharing offering is critical, as Parkview’s teams — like IT and finance — support the program.
Workforce tasks associated with managing the program have grown with the size of its customer base.
“You can imagine our accounts payable and receivables department for finance seeing what we’re doing. I think I got told the other day that, ‘One of these days, Dave, you’re going to have to hire your people that work for them.’ But I have got to pay for them,” he said.
“It really does create more of a burden. The bigger we go, the harder it is.”
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.