Using Data To Seamlessly Unite Two Systems

Nick Patel, MD, chief digital officer, Prisma Health

When South Carolina’s Greenville Health System merged with Palmetto Health in 2017 to create Prisma Health, the two systems did not know each other very well. They had different billing systems and different electronic health records (EHR). They even had different physician referral systems.

“We didn’t know each other, and providers didn’t know what services we had,” says Nick Patel, MD, chief digital officer (CDO) at Prisma Health. “We didn’t have unified [physician] profiles across the network.”

One of Patel’s first tasks as CDO of Prisma was to bring the disparate systems together into a unified system that would help improve patient access. “At the highest level, we wanted to improve online access, and we wanted to take a deeper dive into improving the patient experience,” he says. Prisma serves 1.2 million people in the upstate and midlands regions of South Carolina.

Patel recently joined Erin Jospe, MD, chief medical officer of Kyruus, to talk about how Prisma used data to bring the two health systems together and optimize patient access.

One of Patel’s first projects was to create a comprehensive physician referral and online scheduling system for Prisma Health using the Kyruus platform. Patel decided that the best way to do that was to involve providers and administrators from throughout the system to participate. “It’s very important that we had a physician division leader from each group, and we had the CEOs of each medical group as part of the steering team that helped us make decisions around which way and how the profile was going to flow,” he explains.

Read the full story now and learn more:

How Prisma Health Used Teamwork and Data to Create a Better Patient Experience

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