Houston Methodist’s Community Connect celebrates one year.
It’s been a year since HM launched Community Connect for the first group of physician practices. Since then, it’s allowed us to expand our provider partnerships, linking care teams and venues from different areas, all with one unified goal — improving the lives of our patients.
“Houston Methodist’s Community Connect provides independent providers and health care organizations with a unified and integrated patient record to support patient care, while leveraging the shared resources, knowledge and expertise of an experienced Epic health system,” said Dr. Jordan Dale, HM chief medical information officer. “Connect allows many more individuals — both patients and clinicians — in our Houston community to take advantage of the benefits of Epic to improve access to patients’ health information and facilitate communications among care teams and care transitions.”
A growing health care network that extends beyond technology.
Since we first launched Epic six years ago, we’ve worked diligently to improve and expand it to give our patients a seamless experience, unifying the patient record and improving clinical collaboration across our system. With HM’s Community Connect program, physician practices who work with HM can purchase our best-in-class Epic electronic health record (EHR) and practice management system to use in their practices — adding them to our growing network of health care practices and providers. This allows our Community Connect providers to see a more complete picture of their patients’ health care stories, allowing them to make more informed patient-care decisions and drive better outcomes.
Leveraging our top-rated Epic system and vast EHR experience.
Community Connect gives these practices access to our top-rated Epic system and vast EHR experience, but it’s also designed to meet their needs, at an affordable price. It provides them access to features like patient registration (Prelude), scheduling (Cadence), Epic mobile tools (Haiku/Canto) and third-party applications, such as voice recognition (Dragon) and the ability to e-prescribe medications. Each of these features helps our Community Connect practices and providers to be more efficient, so they can focus more on what’s important — caring for their patients.
How it started. How it’s going.
Community Connect’s first wave of go-lives — including seven practices and 28 providers — launched in June 2021. Fast forward one year later, and there are now 15 practices and 46 providers leveraging HM’s Community Connect.
“When we implemented Community Connect last year, it helped cut our workflow time in half,” said Dr. Monica Shields, FACC and one of the first practices to launch Community Connect. “As we continue getting to know the system better, our efficiency continues to improve. That gives us more time to focus on our patients.”
Looking forward to our biggest launch.
Community Connect continues to experience a significant amount of interest from our HM-affiliated practices. Five practices launched this year with others already scheduled through December. So far, seven more practices and 66 providers are slated to launch for 2022, including our largest practice to date — Medical Clinic of Houston, LLP (MCH).
Medical Clinic of Houston, L.L.P. (MCH) — which includes 45 physicians and over 250 staff members — will launch Community Connect in Q4 2022. This partnership will give patients greater access to their important health information via a unified health record and improve patient care coordination between MCH and HM.
“Leveraging best-in-class partners, like Houston Methodist and Epic, helps MCH provide a unified health record across care settings, geography and multiple sources of health data,” said Dr. Martin White, MCH managing partner. “Our patients will benefit from the addition of this industry-leading technology in our practice and gain greater access to their health care information.”
