Beaumont Health System started out with a simple requirement – submit reports on hospital-acquired infections to the Centers fordisease Control (CdC) to qualify for reimburse-ments from the CmS Inpatient ProspectivePayment System. However, in the process ofsolving this tactical problem, Beaumont realized unexpected strategic benefits – including improved patient safety andincreased responsiveness to the healthcareneeds of its community.Beaumont Health System includes threemajor hospitals and multiple clinics andextended care centers in southeast michigan,with annual revenues over $2.1 billion. It is recognized nationally for its optimal use ofhealthcare technology and was ranked in thetop 250 of the InformationWeek 500 list of toptechnology Innovators for 2012.

IT becomes more strategic with advancedinteroperability technologyBeaumont was struggling with multiple limitations in its legacy interface engine, whichplaced a huge burden on staff resources. thisdrove the Beaumont It team to search for areplacement. “In addition, we wanted morebuilt-in interfaces and more advanced commu-nications capabilities than were available in the legacy software,” explains Subra Sripada,executive Vice President, Chief administrativeand Information Officer at Beaumont. thesenew capabilities included monitoring andalerts.to replace the legacy system Beaumontevaluated InterSystems HealthShare®, a strategicinformatics platform, and vendor competitorson three criteria: alignment of technology withorganizational strategy, functionality, and rapid

Beaumont Health System improves patient safetyusing HealthShare strategic interoperability platform

Beaumont Health System

InterSyStemS HealtHSHare CaSe Study

� Rapid project completion

� Better, safer patient care

� A more strategic IT organization

development capabilities. Beaumont’s interfaceteam conducted a series of proof-of-conceptworkshops where they took their most complexinterfaces and worked with each vendor to re-create them, and to determine ease andspeed of development, reliability, scalability,and data throughput. “We also spoke with ourpeers at multiple healthcare provider organiza-tions,” says Sripada. “the feedback was enlight-ening. Support was a recurring theme withevery organization's staff and InterSystems customers provided positive feedback on thesupport that they received.” Beaumont concluded that HealthShare wasthe best choice. Soon after HealthShare imple-mentation, Beaumont rapidly replaced morethan 150 legacy interfaces between its epiceHr and other systems. With this success,Beaumont It began to address strategic initia-tives that would have been difficult or impossi-ble without HealthShare.A fresh look at the dataHealthShare’s standards support, dataaggregation, and data transformation capabili-ties enabled Beaumont to look at its currentsystems and reporting in a new way. For exam-ple, Beaumont wanted to receive reimburse-ment from the CmS Inpatient ProspectivePayment System based on reducing the rates ofhospital-acquired infection. But this requiredthe organization to submit reports to theCenters for disease Control and Prevention in acustomized Cda/CCd (Clinical documentarchitecture/Continuity of Care document) format. Before HealthShare, the data on hospi-tal-acquired infections was in Beaumont’s eHr,but they had no way to automatically producesuch reports. It was a manual and inefficientprocess. “We've always wanted to make use ofthis data,” says Stephen Bean, It manager atBeaumont, “but didn't have the technology orresources to do it. the data abstraction alonewould have required 20 hours a week, andInterSystems took this off our plate.”HealthShare enabled Beaumont to automati-cally extract the data from the eHr and trans-form it into the correct Cda/CCd format forreporting to CdC and CmS – completing theproject ahead of schedule and easily meetingthe CmS deadline.

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Better information, better care withstrategic interoperabilityWhile healthcare has traditionally seeninteroperability as a tactical problem to beaddressed by It, leaders such as Beaumont areleveraging clinical data with the strategic inter-operability technology of HealthShare toenhance population health and improve patientoutcomes. With a better understanding of hos-pital-acquired infections, Beaumont comparedthis information to community-acquired infec-tions among incoming patients and gained valuable insights. “It's a new way of gettingvalue from our data,” notes Kathleen deSnyder,manager, Quality and Patient Safety atBeaumont. “and we can now benchmark ourperformance on hospital-acquired infectionsagainst other hospitals on a national level.”“Because of what we learned about commu-nity-acquired infections, Beaumont is now better prepared for patients entering ourhealthcare system in terms of antibiotics inventory, isolation techniques, and the like –an unanticipated benefit that occurred onlybecause of this project,” explains deSnyder.“now we can truly use our data to make a difference in patient safety and intervention.” With HealthShare’s ability to access andintegrate all available data, Beaumont is looking at other areas where better informationcan lead to better care. the organization nowuses HealthShare to integrate the data frommedical devices, such as dialysis machines andpatient monitors located in the home and in thehospital, with its eHr. as a result, cliniciansalways have the latest data to use when makingcare decisions.

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