Northern Physicians Organization, based in Traverse City, Mich., has partnered with eMedApps to deploy a real-time notification and analytics system.
The system is designed to connect patient care delivered in area emergency rooms to primary care providers and ancillary care providers, including mental health centers and social workers.
Through the partnership, NPO will adopt eMedApps' CareBridge to bring providers, hospitals and social workers into the continuity-of-care conversation to reduce emergency room overuse, increase care delivery revenues and build a more automated and comprehensive patient engagement program.
Ed Worthington, IT director at NPO, noted that CareBridge determines providers that are linked to patients through a matching process and calculates visit statistics, such as how many ER visits occurred in the last few months.
"This level of visit information helps practices identify patients who should be seen in the clinic, not the ER," he said in a prepared statement.
NPO uses eMedApps' CareBridge interface engine to unlock and unify the patient data held in nine disparate EHR systems. The solution incorporates a notification system to alert providers when their patients have hospital or ER visits across 90 percent of the facilities in the state.
The solution also involves social workers, who are receiving notifications helping them identify and reduce the risk of treating drug-seeking patients, according to a news release.