Long known to Champaign-Urbana residents as rivals, Carle and Christie Clinic are collaborating in an effort to make their patients’ care more seamless.
Starting Oct. 1, Christie Clinic providers will join Epic, an electronic health records system, through Carle’s Community Connect platform. This will allow providers at Christie and Carle to securely access the clinical data of their mutual patients. For patients who see providers at both organizations, this unified record will help enhance care, efficiency, provider communications and access to ancillary results.
By aligning their use of patients’ records, Carle and Christie will allow patients to more easily keep track of upcoming appointments and review medical histories and information. When logging into their portal – whether MyCarle.com or MyChristie.com – patients will see what they’ve always seen at first. When they view upcoming appointments, all Christie Clinic and Carle appointments will appear.
“This improved connectivity will enhance all providers’ ability to care for our patients,” said William Schuh, MD, Carle chief medical information officer. “The biggest winners will be our patients.”
Portal patients who only use Christie Clinic providers or only use Carle providers will not experience any changes.
Although Community Connect officially launches for providers Oct. 1, patients who are – or have been – both Christie Clinic and Carle patients may notice updates sooner.