Use of ambulatory physician group clinical information by hospital-based users within an integrated delivery network

At Intermountain Healthcare, as part of a broad information system transition plan, a proposal was made to replace the integrated ambulatory EHR, used by 550 physicians, with a new stand alone EHR. The notion leading to the proposal was that ambulatory data was infrequently accessed outside of the ambulatory setting. To test this notion, retrospective analysis was done to determine the number of ambulatory patient events accessed by hospital based users. 399 Departments from the Hospital-based group accessed 1, 984, 785 patient events that originated from within the ambulatory group in a 90 day period. This study showed that a significant number of ambulatory patient records were viewed by a wide range of hospital-based users. The decision to replace the legacy ambulatory system with a new, stand alone system was postponed. This analysis was critical in planning the road map for a new integrated clinical information system.