CVS Health and Cleveland Clinic have expanded their eight-year-old clinical affiliation agreement in ways that broaden and streamline electronic communication between healthcare providers in both organizations.
With patient consent, CVS Health and Cleveland Clinic will share as messages and alerts about such things as prescription information, visit summaries, diagnoses and treatment protocols, directly between the treating physicians, CVS Pharmacy and MinuteClinic, via electronic health records (EHR) systems. CVS Pharmacy is the retail pharmacy division of CVS Health, while MinuteClinic, also a CVS unit, operates more than 1,100 walk-in medical clinics, mainly in CVS stores.
CVS Health and Cleveland Clinic also will share standard protocols and quality metrics and review population health data through integrated, secured systems. Patients will continue to use a secure portal account to access their information.
The new arrangement expands a clinical collaboration between Cleveland Clinic and MinuteClinic, the walk-in clinics operated by CVS Health, which began in 2009. Under that arrangement, Cleveland Clinic provides clinical consultation to nurse practitioners at 32 MinuteClinic locations in Northeast Ohio and 15 in Florida.
Louis J. Capponi, chief medical information officer at Cleveland Clinic, says all information transferred between electronic health information systems will be done in a manner compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which governs medical data privacy and security.
“Cleveland Clinic puts patients first and as such we take patients’ privacy and the security of their health information very seriously,” Capponi says. “Cleveland Clinic ensures the security of its patients’ health information by complying with all applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to, the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. We have policies and procedures for our caregivers to ensure compliance, and we provide ongoing education.”
As part of the expanded relationship, CVS Health has joined Cleveland Clinic’s Quality Alliance, a network of healthcare providers that collaborate on quality measures that focus on chronic disease management.
CVS Pharmacy operates about 9,700 stores. In April CVS announced plans for major changes to as many as 70 new and existing stores this year, with plans to expand the program to several hundred more in 2018.
CVS has put a lot of resources into electronic communications and e-commerce over the past few years.In October, for example, CVS Health expanded a pilot project for mobile payment for prescriptions by rolling it out nationally.
In April 2016, CVS added CVS Pay to its pharmacy mobile app. CVS Pay enables customers to refill prescriptions, manage prescriptions and pick up and pay for prescriptions, all within an Apple or Android app. CVS Pays also lets customers use the mobile app to check out in a CVS drug store and to pick up and pay for a prescription from a drive-through lane.
More than 19 million customers have downloaded the CVS mobile app, which among other features lets customers store their payment information and then check out with their smartphone at the pharmacy or in the checkout line. More than 41 million customers also are enrolled in the drugstore chain’s pharmacy text messaging program, a mobile tool that provides users with medication refill reminders and enables easy prescription refills.
Another upgrade CVS is rolling out to its stores allows customers to more quickly reorder for curbside pickup. The CVS Express program was launched in April 2016 and lets customers using the CVS app order items online and pick them up at a nearby CVS store in less than an hour. The newest upgrade lets users see a list of items from past purchases and reorder those products without having to create an entirely new shopping cart.
Cleveland Clinic, the top-ranked institution in Internet Health Management’s recently Digital Hospital 500. CVS is No. 106 in the Internet Retailer Top 1000, which ranks North American retailers by their online sales.
Favorite