Delaware Valley picks NextGen suite to aid behavioral care

The Philadelphia-based healthcare organization is moving to a single integrated electronic health record.

Delaware Valley Community Health is an early adopter of a new behavioral health software suite from NextGen Healthcare intended to aid whole-person treatment.

The Philadelphia-based healthcare organization is moving to the single, integrated physical and behavioral health record, which supports physician practices, community clinics, behavioral health centers and public health departments to conduct case management, crisis intervention, substance abuse, psychiatric, rehabilitation and a certified behavioral health clinic program.

“The NextGen suite gives us a holistic picture of our patients’ complete health data in one place so we are better equipped to treat the whole patient, not just one symptom or disease,” says Isaiah Nathaniel, CIO. “Now that all this data resides in one integrated platform, we can spend more time caring for patients than requesting records or collecting history. This makes the patient experience better and the practice of medicine much more satisfying.”



Delaware Valley went live on the ambulatory software on March 27. All individuals are in need of behavioral health services at some point, Nathaniel believes. The NextGen software supports social determinants of health to better understand patient needs and then move them into the referral process to link up with an appropriate provider. NextGen has a specific template to refer patients to behavioral care, which will help the organization achieve the Triple AIM and at some point the Quadruple AIM, Nathaniel explains.

The only real glitch came when Delaware Valley started customizing internally. They solved 85 percent of issues they wanted to resolve before go-live, but ran out of time to resolve the last 15 percent. But with that task now done, the organization has a complete circle of care from start to finish with its behavioral health suite, Nathaniel says.

Here are more contract wins and go-lives reported during the past week.

* UCLA Health has adopted the Micrsoft Azure cloud computing platform to enable the organization and the David Geffen School of Medicine to synthesize vast amounts of clinical and research data to speed discoveries and improve patient care. UCLA will have access to advanced computing tools to more rapidly interpret and mobilize insights from the data to enhance collaboration among researchers. Artificial intelligence in the tools enables faster processing of data to glean insights. Machine learning enables software to recognize and act on important data patterns without the need for human instruction, producing discoveries as never before, according to the organization.

* CHSPSC, an affiliate of Community Health Systems, has selected the American Red Cross Resuscitation program suite for enterprisewide resuscitation skills training and certification. HealthStream is the vendor providing the platform. Lynn Simon, MD, president of clinical operations and chief medical officer, believes the suite offers exceptional adaptive learning methodology and newer simulation technology with more effective visual feedback.

* Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, La., one of the first women’s specialty hospitals in the nation, has gone live on Meditech’s next-generation electronic health record, called Expanse. The hospital has more than 8,000 deliveries annual, performs 7,600 surgeries, 45,000 breast procedures and more than 55,000 Pap screens.

* Halifax Health in Florida recently implemented a patient liability management solutions suite from Change Healthcare, realizing more than $69 million of self-pay revenue in the initial phase of implementation. The first phase focused on coverage discovery and Medicaid enrollment. The second phase will cover patient engagement and communications to increase collections and patient satisfaction.