Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Corewell Health has been busy integrating technology platforms to support enterprise goals of better quality and cost-effectiveness.
Corewell formed in February 2022 as a combination of Grand Rapids-based Beaumont Health and Southfield-based Spectrum Health. The merger was approved six months after it was announced and the integration work started immediately, said Jason Joseph, chief digital and information officer of the system, on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast."
"Integration of our technology was a really important part of our strategy because we wanted to get to a common brand, a common perspective across the state," he said. "Nothing is more frustrating than when you expect things to be connected and seamless, and you pull open the covers and you realize they're not at all. We knew that was a priority. We set the stage with our board right out of the gates and wound up with a pretty comprehensive technology plan almost from day one."
The health system is now months away from going live with its first integrated Epic site in the South region, and will go live with its Epic ecosystem in July. The Epic ecosystem has around 153 other third parties being standardized. Corewell is als bridging cybersecurity capabilities, communications platforms and the Microsoft 365 environments across the system.
"It has been a very aggressive schedule," Mr. Joseph said. "I am sure our teams can definitely attest to that, but they're doing amazing work and we're really focused on getting over the finish line. There's still going to be some work to do for sure, even once we bring these final capabilities to bear, but it's really going to set the stage for all the things that we're going to be able to do as a system in the future, by having that kind of operational layer and the way we want to run our organization be consistent across the entire state."
In addition to integrating the health system's 21 hospitals and 300-plus ambulatory sites, Corewell is digitally transforming its health plan, which is the second largest in the state.
"Even as we're doing a lot of this work on the care delivery side, there's work that we're going to be doing to modernize and bring some of our systems forward on our health plan as well," said Mr. Joseph. "We also have quite a focus on digital and virtual care, and that's one of the things that's most exciting about getting on the common platforms."
Corewell's IT team's portfolio currently has around 150 to 200 ongoing projects on any given day that include bringing on new facilities and adding to the ambulatory footprint, advancing service lines and integrating physicians.
Looking ahead, Mr. Joseph sees his teams leaning into areas where they can provide additional value, including through value-based care arrangements, care redesign and transforming clinical staffing models to address ongoing shortages. On the technology side, he is focused on adopting more cloud-based functionality.
"We've been, as part of our integration work, certainly moving things to the cloud and [software-as-a-service] where we can, but we need to continue to push that direction as we further consolidate technology platforms," said Mr. Joseph. "A lot of that just has to do with our belief that you can't have an efficient, seamless experience if the foundation and the things underpinning it are complex and disintegrated. We want to make sure that our surface reflects the reality underneath, and that means moving more and more to the cloud, allowing us to get the efficiencies and scalability of that."
Corewell is also focused on automation and leveraging artificial intelligence to adopt additional capabilities, and integrating more between its care and coverage arms. Then the integration of virtual care is also transforming the system's strategy.
"There's really a frontier of how we think about care delivery in the future of not everything coming to us, but bringing that care model to our patients and members whenever we can," said Mr. Joseph. "That is going to be more and more technology and connectivity at its core. We're pretty excited about getting to that point."
While the full integration isn't quite live yet, Corewell has made hundreds of changes through the integration work that yielded "huge value," Mr. Joseph told Becker's. The team's efforts have reduced some costs by integrating systems or created more capabilities at the same cost at the integration level.
Corewell has also made programs in bringing together data management for quality programs across the system. The data now updates in real time and has become more actionable for clinicians.
"We see measurable improvements in our overall quality scores across the board, which is just a really cool and practical, tangible way of seeing how data and technology and moving that to the front of peoples' minds so they can see it and interact with the data, and can actually drive improvements that really make a difference in peoples' lives," said Mr. Joseph. "At the end of the day, it's fun to work with new technology. It's challenging for sure to work in the healthcare business, if you will, this industry. But why we're all here is really because we get to work with saving people and making peoples' lives better on a daily basis."