Collaboration is vital to quality health care. Improved health care comes from better physician-to-physician communication and coordination of care.

Last spring Advocate Physician Partners (APP), a care management and managed care contracting joint venture between select physicians on staff at the Advocate Health Care hospitals in metropolitan Chicago, selected Santa Monica, California-based Intelligent Healthcare to provide the technology for its ambitious effort to further automate its renowned Clinical Integration (CI) Program. CI helps physicians to better align their efforts to improve patient care and quality reporting. Intelligent Healthcare‘s Point of Care Web based population registries provided the ideal platform to further CI.

In 2009 the Advocate Physician Partners’ Clinical Integration Program includes 106 clinical measurements and 15 population disease and preventive care registries as the basis for its Pay for Performance program. The pre-populated registries and reports are used by over 3,200 physicians in APP, including 2,400 private practice physicians as well as Advocate-owned medical groups. Intelligent Healthcare’s web-based tools and reporting enable APP physicians to significantly improve the quality and efficiency of their practices.

Advocate Health Care is the largest health care system in metropolitan Chicago with nine hospitals, two children’s hospitals, and over 5,000 physicians on its hospitals’ medical staffs. The APP Clinical Integration Program has successfully driven its community of hospitals and affiliated physicians to improve clinical outcomes, more easily document performance and follow patients as they receive care. The hospitals and physicians share data and patient information using Intelligent Healthcare’s web based registries and reporting tools.

Higher efficiency and quality allows Advocate hospitals and physicians to attract more patients and earn additional revenue based on improved quality outcomes. The Clinical Integration Program also serves as a focal point around which the hospitals can collaborate with their physicians to build a more efficient system of care.

Paul Katz, Intelligent Healthcare's CEO, said, "Our company's philosophy has always been that physicians will make the right decisions when they have the best information. Advocate has taken this to the next level, proving that community-based hospitals and physicians with shared information and a common purpose can achieve high quality."

Mark Shields, M.D., Senior Medical Director of Advocate Physician Partners, said, "Intelligent Healthcare has been able to integrate data from our many different sources to provide our physicians with better information as they continuously improve the quality and efficiency of the care provided to their patients."