Greenway to provide physician's infrastructure solutions to St. Cloud Medical Group

Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc. is partnering with St. Cloud Medical Group to provide its single-database electronic health record (EHR), practice management and interoperability solution PrimeSuite®, online portal PrimePatient® and remote clinic PrimeMobile™ to St. Cloud's primary care, urgent care, occupational health, surgical, pediatrics, pain management, and OB/GYN services.

Together, Greenway's physician's infrastructure solutions will help eliminate paper charts, streamline clinical and financial workflows and reduce overall manual entry while empowering and engaging patients in the process, according to Anne Cormier, St. Cloud's director of nursing and patient care services, who served as EHR project manager for the independent, multi-specialty practice.

"We needed to find a system that the doctors would use," said Cormier. "They wanted to feel like they had completed the majority of their work when they left the exam room and have the means to engage the patient in the process. It wasn't about whether the front office would work better than the back office. Practice management is an important piece, but if providers don't use the EHR there's no point in investing in the system."

To find the right solutions, Cormier led a committee of specialty providers and administrators, with input from IT and finance departments beginning in January of 2009. Transition goals ranged from utilizing electronic data to pursue quality indicators; enhancing charge capture; maximizing the receipt of government incentive dollars, including EHR meaningful use stimulus funds; and changing transcription to data entry for the purpose of capturing reportable information.

For Elaina Lee, MD, FAAP, in St. Cloud's Department of Pediatrics, several aspects of Greenway's functionality led to its selection. "Having a certified product that will allow us to achieve EHR meaningful use is important, and a system designed for clinic use rather than an inpatient solution that has been adapted for the clinic. PrimeSuite is also user friendly and implementation involves one-on-one training. Ultimately, Greenway's innovative technology presented like it would meet our needs across all specialties."

"We also wanted to return to seeing the same number of patients per day soon after going live," adds Cormier. "That's why the patient portal is key. We want to engage the patients." PrimePatient provides a secure, online ability for pre-registration, appointment scheduling, prescription renewal requests, patient-provider communication and the use of personal health records.

And because St. Cloud providers admit patients to one central hospital, "we wanted the PrimeMobile functionality during hospital rounding to access patient records," she said. PrimeMobile provides remote access of PrimeSuite data, allowing the automated exchange, review and updating of clinical functions, charge capture and other tasks via handheld tablets and Apple's iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch™ for example.

"We have medical students we're interviewing who have never touched a paper chart," she said, "but we just couldn't do seamless care." To make the change, Cormier's search committee solicited RFPs from six EHR providers, invited four demonstrations, and then embarked on three site visits, a yearlong process that included an invitation to communicate with a Minnesota-area Greenway users group before selecting Greenway's solutions.

"We are excited to be part of this new advancement in the healthcare experience for the St. Cloud Medical Group's patients and providers," said Greenway President and CEO Tee Green. "We are committed to delivering the most advanced customer service in the industry and partnering with customers for the long term. All of our systems and processes have been designed to advance clinical and financial success at the highest level." 

"An integrated platform really was one of our main criteria," said Cormier. "Some other candidates said we would not notice the difference but we really did. First and foremost, it was a provider decision. Our providers became advocates for our own population and gained an awareness of their peers, and championed each other in negotiations, and we kept the financials blind throughout the process because our feeling was we were looking for a partner and not a vendor."