Concentra Adds EMRs For Worksite Clinics

Concentra, which operates more than 250 worksite health clinics for employers including General Electric, Honda, and Aetna, is rolling out e-medical records at its healthcare facilities.

Concentra is implementing the WebChart suite of enterprise e-medical record software from Medical Informatics Engineering. MIE provides its Web-based offering via a software-as-a-service model. The software runs on a variety of computing devices and can exchange data with payers, laboratories, and other third parties, including other Web-based personal EMR platforms such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, said Peter Norder, MIE executive VP.

Concentra provides urgent care, wellness services, and primary care, in addition to the occupational health services offered at its worksite clinics, which are generally located on large campuses where employers often have 1,000 to 4,000 workers, said Dr. Bill Lewis, Concentra senior VP of medical operations. Concentra operates worksite health clinics for approximately 180 employers, Lewis said.

While Concentra will be using its new EMR system to compile records of patients treated at its workplace clinics, employers of those workers will not have access to those digitized records, said Lewis. "We're cognizant of this concern" of patients, said Lewis. The confidentiality and privacy of these patient records is "no different" than in other healthcare settings where worksites aren't part of the environment, he said.

Patients will be able to access their records via a patient portal according to the arrangements set up between Concentra, the employers, and their benefits providers, said Lewis.

In addition to its worksite clinics, Concentra also runs about 300 "brick and mortar" health clinics in 30 states, said Lewis. At those facilities the company uses a homegrown, proprietary e-medical record system which doesn't meet the needs of Concentra's worksite clinics. For the most part, until recently the worksite facilities had predominately paper-based records, but also a mix of various software programs, said Lewis.

Because Concentra offers its healthcare services via worksite and standalone clinics, Lewis says the company is not eligible to participate in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's $20 billion-plus HITECH programs which will begin in 2011 rewarding doctors and hospitals for their meaningful use of health IT, such as e-health records.

While Concentra rolls out MIE e-health records at its worksite clinics, Dossia, another provider of employee e-health records, this week announced enhancements to its offering.

Dossia is funded by a consortium of about a dozen employers, including Wal-Mart and Intel, who make available to their workers Dossia-developed personal e-health records.

Under a new pact between Dossia and the Mayo Clinic, Dossia is integrating into its Dossia Personal Health Platform personal health management tools provided by Mayo via a portal.

This new relationship allows members of the Dossia network to access Mayo Clinic EmbodyHealth online health applications to better manage their health and wellness, including behavioral change programs, health assessments, and instructional health videos.