Advocate Health Care:

bout 500 of the 800 physicians in the Advocate Medical Group have implemented the Allscripts Enterprise EHR. Advocate's 12 hospitals in the Chicago area are using Cerner (Kansas City, Mo.), and the organization is building a bidirectional interface between Cerner and Allscripts that's scheduled for completion by the end of this year. Advocate is also using Allscripts' discharge planning, and home care systems-two important pieces of the post-acute-care puzzle.  Advocate Physician Partners (APP), a care management and contracting organization, includes 3,600 doctors on the staffs of Advocate hospitals. The community doctors in APP have decided to adopt the eClinicalWorks (Westborough, Mass.) EHR. Smith says that Advocate plans to build an interface between Cerner and eClinicalWorks, and eventually, between eClinicalWorks and Allscripts. The healthcare system is also working with a middleware vendor, Carefx, to set up a portal that will sit on top of all three systems, allowing doctors to view combined data at the point of care.