SYLACAUGA, Ala. – On Friday, April 6, Dr. Chip Grant introduced a new networking platform to be implemented at Sylacauga Alliance for Family Enhancement and Coosa Valley Medical Center.
Grant, the CEO for Watershed Health, came to Coosa Valley Medical Center (CVMC) to present a new software platform,Watershed, to use throughout the Sylacauga area. Watershed is the software platform that allows connectivity and real-time sharing. The CVMC nursing home, hospital, Sylacauga Alliance for Family Enhancement and more are all trying to take care of patients, but there is a lack of communication causing each of the organizations to not know what the other is doing.
Grant said Watershed will fix this fragmentation problem. “The fragmentation is harmful. This is for every health care center in the area to use to stay connected. If you deliver health care in the community, you already have a system. The solution is everybody has to be willing to step out of their turf and work in this common denominator. It’s not ‘go write a note in your system and write the same note in my system.’ It’s very minimal. Share the key information and communicate.”
Watershed is looking for people who are on the cutting edge of integration in health care, and looking forward to doing this in Sylacauga with CVMC and SAFE. “We were blown away by the work Margaret Morton and Nancy Dickson have done in Sylacauga since 2000,” said Grant. “For us, this is a perfect fit. We have the technology, and we think we have a software platform that can deliver all the things that are needed. At the end of the analysis, if you don’t have a community that wants to integrate, it’s not going to work. For us, that was a key piece of this equation.”
“From our perspective, we have been working on connecting since 2000 with Get Healthy Talladega County, said Margaret Morton, the director of SAFE. “What we didn’t have was taking it to the next level in terms of the technology and platform to truly integrate on a real-time, moment-to-moment time frame so that we are really responding to the patient’s needs, a patient-centered approach. The right-hand didn’t necessarily know what the left-hand was doing. We were all scurrying around on the phone, driving here and there.”
Watershed’s online platform is for all health care systems, enabling them to stay connected and give easy access to health care providers about their patients. “This gives us the ability to identify those patients who are greatest at risk, and to respond in a proactive way to them on the front end and teach them how to manage,” said Margaret. “Its not about whether or not you live in poverty, its for anybody that is trying to navigate the health care system. When a patient leaves CVMC, they have no control over the outcomes, and yet they are held accountable for it, which in turn affects the entire community’s wellness. When we connected with Dr. Grant, we were blown away; it has been a phenomenal opportunity.”
