SIH partners with BJC Collaborative

Staff Report

CARBONDALE, IL  Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH) today announced that it would participate in The BJC Collaborative, a partnership among health care systems throughout Illinois, Missouri and Eastern Kansas.

BJC HealthCare (St. Louis, Mo.), Memorial Health System (Springfield, Ill.), Saint Luke’s Health System (Kansas City, Mo.) and CoxHealth (Springfield, Mo.) founded the Collaborative in October 2012 to improve the quality and efficiency of health care in the region. Blessing Health System in Quincy, Ill. joined the Collaborative in May 2013. SIH becomes the sixth Collaborative member to join the group since its inception.

While remaining independent, member and participant organizations will collaborate to achieve savings, deploy clinical programs and services to improve access to and quality of health care for patients, lower health care costs and create additional efficiencies that will benefit patients and communities.

A significant benefit of the BJC Collaborative is enhanced access to St. Louis health care resources, where SIH patients are frequently referred for specialized medical care or treatment. BJC HealthCare includes Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine.

The four founding members of the Collaborative have nearly 5,000 hospital beds, 52,600 employees and 6,933 employed and affiliated physicians across their adjacent service areas. The SIH System has 285 licensed beds, 316 medical staff physicians and 3,200 employees.

The BJC Collaborative offers SIH the opportunity to participate in multiple existing initiatives, to the benefit of SIH and the communities it serves. Those initiatives include:

• Population Health Management – population health information and assessment, physician recruitment and engagement strategies, including Accountable Care Organizations and medical home development.

• Clinical and Service Quality – performance improvement, staff development and training, including eLearning, management and leadership development, clinical skills training, clinical decision support, safety event reporting and emergency preparedness.

• Capital Asset Management – supply chain relationships, facilities design, clinical engineering, technology evaluation, energy conservation and facilities management.

• Financial Services – capital resource evaluation analysis, treasury options, revenue cycle, business intelligence and actuarial expertise.

• Information Systems and Technology – meaningful use of health IT, data center management, data warehousing, software applications, hardware configurations and emerging technologies, data security and patient confidentiality.

SIH’s participation in the Collaborative will also offer the opportunity to provide input on additional future initiatives, including those specifically related to the unique challenges faced by SIH and the communities it serves.

“SIH has taken a bold step in the rapidly changing face of health care and aligned itself with an excellent group of health care providers,” said SIH President and CEO Rex Budde. “This relationship is powerful. It provides SIH with access to the shared expertise of the Collaborative partners to work together on population health management and adapt to changes coming out of managed care. We can also tap into BJC’s world-class programs to improve patient care.”

“Participation in the Collaborative is a natural outgrowth of Southern Illinois Healthcare’s longtime relationship with Barnes-Jewish Hospital, our adult academic medical center and a Midwest regional referral center for advanced medical care,” said Sandra Van Trease, BJC Group President. “We look forward to further exploring the potential to develop even stronger clinical relationships through our Collaborative work.”

SIH Board of Trustees Chairman Steve Sabens said the expanded relationship makes SIH an even stronger system.

“The fact that we are in the position where one of the largest, most respected health care organizations (BJC) in the United States is interested and willing to partner with us is exhilarating. We are a very sound system both medically and financially and I think we can provide some expertise to BJC and our new Collaborative partners as well,” Sabens said.