Clinical components of the merger between Intermountain Health and SCL Health have included integrating clinical care, integrating medical staffs, and promoting simplification of the experience of clinicians and patients.
Intermountain Health Chief Clinical Officer JP Valin, MD, MHA, has been managing the clinical elements of the 2022 merger between Intermountain Health and SCL Health.
There are several clinical aspects of the merger between the health systems. These include integrating clinical care, integrating medical staffs, and promoting simplification of the experience of clinicians and patients, Valin says in this week's HealthLeaders podcast.
When Valin came into the role as chief clinical officer of the new Intermountain Health post-merger, he was told that Rule No. 1 should be to not break anything.
"That was a great comment because both organizations had very long and storied histories of clinical excellence and providing great clinical care," he says.
JP Valin, MD, MHA, is chief clinical officer of Intermountain Health. Photo courtesy of Intermountain Health.
Over the past two years, Valin has been leading a phased approach to merging clinical care at Intermountain Health and SCL Health.
The first phase has involved "wiring and plumbing," Valin says.
"When you build a new house, you need to put the wiring and plumbing in before you can close the walls," he says. "We needed to do that work as part of our merger. We were coming from a place where both organizations did things well, but we did things differently."
For example, Intermountain Health and SCL Health had different software utilization, with one organization using MicroSoft and the other using Google.
"We had to combine on MicroSoft to be able to communicate," he says.
Intermountain Health and SCL Health have also been working to get on the same EHR. SCL Health was on Epic, and Intermountain Health used mainly Cerner. The process to shift Intermountain Health to Epic should be complete by the end of this year.
The second phase of the merger effort was a period of clinical discovery, Valin says.
"We spent time getting to know each other across the organizations and bringing together teams from the organizations to meet each other and share what each organization was doing," he says. "This second phase allowed us to identify best practices that we could share as organizations."
The third phase has involved building structures and processes to connect people together and to connect leadership structures together, Valin says.
"We wanted to align our work and integrate clinical care across the new Intermountain Health," he says. "We are more than two years into this work. We have made tremendous progress, but we are still not done."
Christopher Cheney is the CMO editor at HealthLeaders.