3 best practices for a successful data integration strategy

Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) has an expansive healthcare footprint, spanning seven states from Alaska to Texas. With integration a key focus for the system, guaranteeing data integrity across its acute care and ambulatory care facilities has been vital.

The health system has 51 acute care hospitals, representing about 12,000 licensed beds, and an extensive ambulatory environment, comprised of 18 ambulatory surgery centers, 17 imaging centers, 48 urgent care centers, 33 retail clinics, 264 primary clinics, and 461 specialty clinics.

“If we can’t create an integrated platform that gets our patient data where it needs to be so our providers can easily access it when it’s needed, that has significant impact on our day-to-day operations,” said JoAnn DiConti, Executive Director of Epic Implementations for St. Joseph Health. Over the past few years, the PSJH system has been working to integrate each of its legacy Providence Health & Services facilities to one version of its Epic electronic health record (EHR) platform to help streamline care and better ensure that the EHR holds accurate and complete data for each one of its 14 million patient records.