Marshfield Clinic puts its EHR on the market

One of the largest patient databases in the country soon will be created, thanks to the commercialization of Marshfield Clinic's homegrown electronic health record system.

The Wisconsin health system recently offered up its CattailsMD EHR, developed in-house over more than two decades, for commercial sale. The first taker was a neighboring health system -- Ministry Health Care of Milwaukee. Ministry has hospitals and medical groups in the northern part of Wisconsin, an area also served by Marshfield.

Large network of physicians, patients

Ministry's implementation of the system, expected to take about three years, will result in a database with more than 2.5 million patient records from both Ministry and Marshfield, the organizations said. The two health systems will be connected, creating a regional health information organization with interoperability between all of both systems' facilities. Ministry and Marshfield combined have 1,000 doctors.

Pete Sanderson, MD, director of medical informatics operations for Ministry Health Care, said part of the attractiveness of the Cattails system was the ability to share patient data with Marshfield, with whom Ministry has had a relationship for more than a century.

Carl Christensen, CIO of Marshfield, said bringing Ministry on to the Cattails system gave a big boost to Wis. Gov. James Doyle's efforts to create a statewide health information exchange.

Records with a wider reach

Kim R. Pemble, executive director of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange, a regional exchange in the Milwaukee area, agrees there's an advantage to hospitals choosing an electronic medical records system that doubles as a data exchange.

"It simplifies the process" of expanding an HIE, he said. Once an exchange is up and running, only one connection to the HIE needs to be made in order to include all the health care facilities on the same EHR.

"When you look around the country and all the efforts being done to bring information exchanges together and the difficulty in doing so, us sharing a single record takes away those complexities," Dr. Sanderson said.

Christensen said Marshfield's goal is to expand outside of Wisconsin and have Cattails play a role in creating the national HIE.

Dr. Sanderson said another advantage to a system like Cattails is that it was developed by physicians.

Christensen said it used to be common for teaching facilities to partner with large technology companies to market their homegrown IT systems, but that practice is fading.

While nonphysician vendors of records systems are often bottom-line driven, vendors of physician-created EHRs are more likely to focus on patient safety, Christensen said. "One of the things we are trying to do is keep that model alive."