Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System and pharmaceutical company Merck have announced a multiyear initiative aimed at using health IT and other strategies to improve patient adherence to treatment regimens, the Philadelphia Business Journal reports.
The companies did not disclose the financial terms of their collaboration (George, Philadelphia Business Journal, 6/18).
Details of the Project
For the initiative, employees from Geisinger and Merck will collaborate on efforts to:
- Expand patients' role in making decisions about their health conditions;
- Improve patients' treatment adherence;
- Improve care delivery processes; and
- Share information among extended care teams (Barr, Modern Healthcare, 6/18).
Web Application
For the first project of the initiative, Geisinger and Merck will develop a Web application to help primary care providers assess and engage patients at risk for conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
Thomas Graf -- Geisinger's clinical lead for the project -- said the Web tool will operate in a cloud-based environment and will be able to connect with any electronic health record system (Baum, MedCity News, 6/18).
The Web application and any additional tools developed under the partnership initially will be tested within Geisinger Health System (Modern Healthcare, 6/18).
Geisinger CEO Glenn Steele Jr. said that successful applications potentially could be expanded to other hospital systems (MedCity News, 6/18).