Renton, Wash.-based Providence and Charleston, S.C.-based MUSC Health are partnering on digital transformation.
Here are seven things to know:
1. MUSC Health is the first outside health system to use MedPearl, a digital clinical referral platform developed at Providence.
2. At Providence, MedPearl has been used by more than 7,000 clinicians. The educational tool, which covers over 700 medical conditions, was built by about 300 Providence clinicians. It generates recommended referrals for providers based on a patient's symptoms.
During the pilot phase at Providence, 72% of providers said the platform improved their clinical care plan, 20% said the tool allowed them to avoid a referral, while another 20% said it changed their referral. In MUSC's pilot, 23% of providers said they avoided a referral because of MedPearl.
3. MedPearl will be integrated into MUSC Health's Epic EHR.
4. MUSC Health is also going live in January with Providence spinoff DexCare, a digital platform that helps manage health system capacity. The financial terms of the deals are not being disclosed.
5. The partnership illustrates how health systems have to think differently about tech, Providence and MUSC Health leaders say.
"The vendor landscape hasn't been able to solve our problems, so it has to come from within," Eve Cunningham, MD, chief of virtual care and digital health at Providence, told Becker's. "The only way we're going to disrupt healthcare is from the inside."
"I'm always interested in solutions that have heavy involvement from health systems or spun out of health systems," said Kaitlyn Torrence, executive director of MUSC Health Solutions. "Rather than the tech guy that got his friend and they just started creating a company in the garage, and then they're going to come and learn healthcare. Healthcare innovation has to be born from within."
"Tech has tons of opportunity, but tech doesn't know healthcare," Dr. Cunningham said. "They don't know what it's like to take care of patients and all of the complexities of healthcare. Tech has tried to disrupt us for, what, 10 years, and just hasn't really made a lot of inroads because they don't understand all of the meat and potatoes and the things that are underneath."
6. On the outside, the two organizations might seem different. Providence is a 51-hospital nonprofit system based in the Pacific Northwest with locations in seven states. MUSC Health is an academic system with 16 hospitals across South Carolina.
But they both deal with the same issues that threaten healthcare as a whole, their leaders say: rising costs, thinning reimbursements, an aging population.
"We're not in a situation where every health system can make these massive investments in digital transformation and do it all on their own. We have to lean on each other to be able to do it," Dr. Cunningham said. "And ultimately, it's so hard as a clinician, seeing so many patients who fall through the cracks, patients who waited months to be seen and they weren't even supposed to see you. They were supposed to see someone else."
The two health systems also both have experience with interindustry collaborations. In 2022, MUSC Health launched a nonprofit virtual care platform called Ovatient in partnership with Cleveland-based MetroHealth System. Meanwhile, Providence has developed other tech tools that have been adopted by outside health systems.
Ms. Torrence also previously worked at Providence, where she served in strategy and business development and tech project manager roles.
In addition, MUSC Health is looking at Providence as a model as it launches an investment fund arm and innovation incubator. The Washington-based health system has mature, robust versions of both.
7. The partnership signifies the "death of the point solution," as Ms. Torrence called it.
Nicole Williams, a strategy and business development leader at Providence, said it's an "early warning" to vendors that "health systems are going to start working together, so you better be willing to also work together with other companies."
"The future of all of this tech that's rolling out is going to be the willingness to play with one another," she said. "Because healthcare systems are not going to continue getting these one-off things."
"If it's a point solution, it has to plug into a platform very easily," Dr. Cunningham said. "To bring in a whole bunch of random point solutions — we don't have the resources and the capability to maintain that."
"When systems are collaborating and co-piloting each other's stuff, the healthcare landscape is evolving," Ms. Williams said.
Check out Eve Cunningham, MD, chief of virtual care and digital health at Providence, and Kaitlyn Torrence, executive director of MUSC Health Solutions, who will discuss this and other digital projects as two of the more than 425 speakers at Becker's Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference Oct. 1-4 in Chicago.