By Jim Plews-Ogan, MD and Jim Nataro MD PhD MBA
Fortify Children’s Health is a new clinically integrated network (CIN) that includes the UVA Children’s Hospital, The Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters, and Pediatric Associates of Charlottesville. It is the first pediatric CIN in the country to be formed as a partnership between two children’s hospitals. A key mission of the CIN is to increase quality of care for children across the Commonwealth, by increasing coordination, closing gaps in care, and providing data for our clinicians to utilize at the point of care, and for teams to better manage populations of children within our care.
A key innovation of Fortify Children’s Health is a newly launched population health Information Technology (IT) platform called HealtheIntent that integrates with EPIC to automatically pull data and organize it into 14 topical registries:
- To close gaps at the point of care,
- To gather and monitor data for quality improvement projects,
- And for population health management.
We are excited to share that the HealtheIntent platform has officially gone live (and therefore so has Fortify!) in August of this year, thanks to countless hours of hard work by the Fortify team, and by so many of our pediatricians. Fortify is pediatrician-led: seven of its 11 Board members and the Executive Director are practicing pediatricians. Ms. Karin Skeen, a pediatric critical care nurse and the leader of the Women’s and Children’s Service line at UVA is also on the Board of Managers. The strong representation of healthcare providers will ensure that the focus of the CIN remains the welfare of our patients, respecting the time and energy of the providers.
All of the data within the registries are being validated to assure they are 95% accurate; this ensures that the data are most helpful to you, the provider. As the validation process is completed additional data within each registry will become available at the point of care. As registries go live, a FCH staff member will meet with the affected providers to review how the registry and its data can be most useful. Three registries are currently live with as yet limited data: Wellness, Asthma, and Epilepsy. New ones will come on line every month.
In the meantime, look for the FCH tab in the PLAN section of the EPIC patient record, or in your RESOURCE tab within EPIC. Feel free to click around within the domain, and if you have questions, please contact:
- Jim Plews-Ogan, M.D., M.S.— CMO:jlp3z@virginia.edu
- Bryan Thorne, M.D., Ph.D. –Director of Informatics: bct3d@virginia.edu
Filed Under: Features