Health

HEALTH • Summer 2018 21 We help remove obstacles so you can focus on the health of your communities. At Marsh & McLennan Agency, we understand that you want to execute your mission while keeping your assets, your people, and your reputation safe. Our Healthcare Practice group specializes in providing risk management services and cutting-edge solutions to the healthcare community. Visit mma-ne.com to learn more. WORLD CLASS. LOCAL TOUCH. In the last 12 months, the percentage of those who said they use electronic means of checking on their health care: Room to improve in healthcare IT Source: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Confident safeguards are in place to protect records from unauthorized viewing Concerned about unauthorized viewing when health informa- tion is electronically exchanged between providers Withold information from healthcare provider due to privacy or security concerns Percent who answered the following in each year... 2011 2014 2017 75 75 74 65 70 66 12 15 10 launched Epic, its $650-million elec- tronic patient records system, which covers 3 million records and required hiring 125 workers for the upgrade. The costly switch to electronic records was done primarily to improve coordination of patient care and to enhance the experience for health-care providers, said Eric Alper, UMass Memorial Health Care's vice president and chief clinical informat- ics officer. Before the Epic launch, systems even within UMass had diffi- culty connecting with each other, like the emergency department with the ICU. Now, the healthcare system can even pull up patient information shared through other area systems, like Reliant Medical Group and Partners HealthCare. "Healthcare workers now do most of their work using electronic systems instead of on paper," Alper said. "Our providers can now see all documenta- tion about a patient in one place, including a single medication and allergy list, all images, electrocardio- grams, etc." Finding potential As the largest healthcare system in Central Massachusetts, UMass Memorial Health Care has an ability to keep those services in- house. Many smaller offices or networks do not. That's where the largest poten- tial is seen for Versatile, whose list of clients does include some rel- atively larger sys- tems, such as Lowell General Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Versatile also has offices in Tampa, Fla., and in Island Pond, Vt., a small town in the north- east reaches of the state which Christianson said is a underserved health care IT market. Versatile Healthcare Solutions has a team of two dozen for managed and technical services, including providing a call center for remote access and on-site dispatch to clear up IT problems. "We've certain- ly seen the advent of care being delivered at the edge," Barker said. Versatile has found that doctors have recently gone from being con- cerned about using IT in health care in a meaning- ful way to seeing it improvse care. "The real punchline," Christianson said, "is that we make technology work so clinicians can take care of patients." H "The real punchline is that we make technology work so clinicians can take care of patients." David Christianson, Versatile senior vice president

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