Healthcare Robotics: Patently Incredible Inventions

Healthcare Robotics: Patently Incredible Inventions(click image for larger view)

Cerner, one of the largest health IT organizations in the country, announced a partnership with Intermountain Healthcare Friday in an effort to further develop its existing health technologies.

Cerner and Intermountain will collaborate on activity-based costing, which can help providers, particularly accountable care organizations, measure the cost of delivering care.

"A lot of this partnership revolves around shared accountability and how we'll meet the needs of a changing payment model for healthcare," said Intermountain CIO Marc Probst.

Intermountain, the largest health provider in the Intermountain West region of the U.S., will replace its existing electronic health record system with Cerner's system. This includes the replacement of Intermountain's two EHRs, two billing systems and desktop integration system.

"The new integrated system will be the foundation for future innovation and work," said Probst. "We share a vision of where healthcare should be and how technology can support it."

The announcement comes on the heels of Partners Healthcare's implementation of Epic, another EHR giant, after many years of an in-house system. Partners is a large non-profit healthcare system in Boston.

Probst said Intermountain decided to partner with Cerner because of its system's open architecture, which allows for the addition of the new content Intermountain will provide.

The partnership will include development of care-process models, connectivity-based costing, advanced-decision support and clinical workflows.

Several Cerner leaders and staff will relocate to Intermountain's headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, led by Cerner executive VP Jeff Townsend.

This is a long-term partnership, Probst said. "We're looking at 20 plus years of collaboration. We have shared interests in making this be a great success."