UCI Health Implements Provider Information Management Platform

October 18, 2019 - California-based UCI Health has implemented a healthcare provider information management platform to keep its provider community informed about patient care.

UCI Health opted to go with Phynd Technologies for its platform, which provides a single, digitized, and searchable system containing providers and their subspecialties, locations, and health plan participation.

“We are a big proponent of making sure that our primary care providers understand what happens to their patient when the patient gets out of the hospital or is seen by one of our specialist consults. We are a large specialty consulting type of organization where we have quite a few specialists who see patients from the community,” Sri Bharadwaj, chief information security officer for UCI Health, told HITInfrastructure.com.

“Our goal is to make sure that the patient information is fed back into the community, so the primary care providers who take care of these patients understand what's happening, what we have provided in terms of the care plan, and what we are expecting the patient to do afterwards. This helps the providers immensely in the community because many times patients do not understand or find it difficult to comprehend some of the more complex aspects of treatment,” Bharadwaj explained.

In addition to UCI Health, UC San Diego Health recently deployed the Phynd platform. The two UC Health centers share an Epic electronic health record, which integrates with Phynd.

"The bi-directional integration with Epic will ensure that provider, specialty, location, health plan and other information in Epic is always accurate and up-to-date," explained Bharadwaj.

UC Health consists of five academic healthcare centers and is the fourth largest health delivery system in California. Around half of medical students and medical residents in California are trained at UC schools.

UC San Diego Health provides clinical care, research, and teaching at locations in Hillcrest and La Jolla, while UCI Health provides similar services in Orange County, California.

"We're pleased to be expanding our UC Health partnership with the addition of UC San Diego," said Phynd CEO Tom White in a statement. "We look forward to UC San Diego Health, a leader in numerous medical and surgical specialties, joining the growing number of health systems deploying Phynd to ensure that provider, place and payor information is always up-to-date in their EHR and other mission-critical systems."

Bharadwaj related that the physician population is fragmented, so the information management platform helps the fragmented physician group get up-to-date information from UCI Health.

“One of the core components of how we execute this is to make sure the data is accurate and that the data is going to the right physician. That's a key aspect of it. So, for us, Phynd, delivers value to us by bringing in data that we can use to effectively communicate to our providers,” he said.

“When the patient comes to us, the primary care physician [PCP] doesn't necessarily know what we told the patient. Sending that communication to the physician is critical for not just the patient, but also for the physician,” Bharadwaj added.

Prior to deploying Phynd, UCI Health and UC San Diego Health had a homegrown siloed database system.

“With Phynd, what we have done is to eliminate the friction between the PCP and the specialist in how we send the communication. So, we're solving the interoperability issue,” he related.

Bharadwaj advised healthcare organizations considering a provider information platform to look how the system keeps the data up to date and relevant with an ever-changing community of physicians.

“Having this information delivered to the physician helps bridge that gap between the doctors within the organization and outside the organization,” he concluded.