Marshfield Clinic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marshfield Clinic is a medical system with 41 centers located in northern, central and western Wisconsin as of 2006. It was founded in 1916 by six local physicians: K.W. Doege, M.D.; William Hipke, M.D.; Victor Mason, M.D.; Walter G. Sexton, M.D.; H.H. Milbee, M.D. and Roy P. Potter, M.D. in the community of Marshfield, Wisconsin. Marshfield Clinic operates as a charitable corporation with all of its assets held in a charitable trust. It is the largest private group medical practice in Wisconsin and one of the largest in the United States.

Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, a division of Marshfield Clinic, is the largest private not-for-profit research organization in Wisconsin. It is composed of five research centers: the National Farm Medicine Center, the Marshfield Epidemiologic Research Center, the Center for Human Genetics, the Biomedical Informatics Research Center and the Clinical Research Center.

Marshfield Clinic Education Foundation, Marshfield Clinic's education division, provides residency programs for medical school graduates in the disciplines of internal medicine, pediatrics, medicine and pediatrics, dermatology, surgery and transitional year. All programs are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) of the American Medical Association. About 125 members of the Marshfield Clinic staff hold clinical teaching appointments from the University of Wisconsin - Madison Medical School.

Marshfield Clinic's health maintenance organization (HMO), Security Health Plan of Wisconsin, Inc, was established in 1986 as an outgrowth of Greater Marshfield Community Health Plan, which began in 1971 as one of the earliest HMOs in the country. It serves more than 115,000 people in a 29-county area in northern, western and central Wisconsin.

January 29, 2007 Marshfield Clinic Press Release

Marshfield Clinic's CattailsMD (Version 5) is the first internally developed ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) in the nation to achieve Certification Commission for Healthcare Information TechnologySM (CCHIT) certification.

CCHIT today announced that Marshfield Clinic is CCHIT CertifiedSM for its product ? CattailsMD (Version 5) - and meets CCHIT ambulatory EHR criteria for 2006. Ambulatory EHRs are designed for clinics and physician offices where most Americans get their health care.

"This certification acknowledges the comprehensiveness of Marshfield Clinic's EHR," said Carl Christensen, chief information officer, Marshfield Clinic.

"Widespread implementation of functional, interoperable and secure EHRs plays an important role in transforming our health care system to be safer, more efficient, timely, patient-centered, equitable and effective. Information technology plays an important role in Marshfield Clinic's commitment to improving the health of patients we serve. I am very proud of the work done by Marshfield Clinic's physicians and Information Systems professionals in building this state-of-the-art EHR."

"Our pursuit of CCHIT Certified status is one more example of Marshfield Clinic's commitment to remain a national leader in using information technology to improve patient care," said Justin Starren, M.D., Ph.D., FACMI, director, Marshfield Clinic Biomedical Informatics Research Center and associate medical director, Medical Informatics.

According to Karl Ulrich, M.D., M.M.M., president and chief executive officer, Marshfield Clinic, "an internally-developed EHR must stand up to criticism from physicians who use it. Over time, our product has been scrutinized and developed by physicians who work intimately with our programmers to make it physician-friendly. If it doesn't work for end users, it is not implemented. As Marshfield Clinic moves to commercialize our EHR, we will actively continue to seek physician input."

"This is something we are extremely proud of," said John Melski, M.D., medical director, Clinical Informatics. "We have a very talented group of physicians and IT professionals who have a passion for excellence, continually striving to set our own bar higher. Marshfield Clinic will continue to play a leadership role as the nation addresses the access, cost, safety and translational medicine challenges of the new EHR frontier."

CCHIT is an independent, voluntary private-sector initiative, awarded a three-year contract in September 2005 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop and evaluate certification criteria and an inspection process for clinic and office EHRs, hospital EHRs and networks through which they work. This non-profit organization sets the benchmark for EHRs. CCHIT CertifiedSM product certification provides an objective set of criteria against which health information technology products can be measured to enable purchasers to reliably make an investment in those products and to assure health care consumers they can trust their information to be stored in those products.

As a CCHIT Certified product, CattailsMD (Version 5) has been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a comprehensive set of criteria for:

Functionality, ability to create and manage electronic records for all patients, as well as automating workflow in a physician's office

Interoperability, a first step in the ability to receive and send electronic data to other entities, such as laboratories

Security, ability to keep patients' information safe

The CCHIT Certified mark - a "seal of approval" for EHR products - provides the first consensus-based, consistent benchmark for ambulatory products. By looking to products with the CCHIT Certified seal, physicians and other providers can be assured they are making a reliable investment and insurers and other payers know the products meet expected industry standards.