In a tough economy where Darwinian competition seems to be the name of the game, is collaboration with rivals wise? In the health care business in Wisconsin, some providers are finding it to be so.

Last week I spoke with Will Weider, CIO for Ministry Health Care in Wisconsin. We talked mostly about application performance management and how it has helped him implement electronic health records (EHR) technology; we'll post the interview later this week. But in discussing EHR deployment and adoption, Weider touched on some intriguing examples of collaboration, and I think they bear highlighting.

Ministry Health Care, which has 2.5 million patients and the largest patient database in the state, has spent the last three years rolling out EHR to its medical group. The EHR solution selected is somewhat unusual in that it comes from a competing health care organization in Wisconsin, Marshfield Clinic, which developed the technology about 20 years ago.

Calling Marshfield's EHR system remarkable, Weider said he considers it the best success story in the realm of "homegrown EHR." It is sold commercially but isn't a big name in the business. Marshfield Clinic runs the back end of the system, so Ministry Health Care didn't have to buy its own servers, and the implementation centered mostly on preparing the clinics, increasing bandwidth, adding redundancy to the network, and preparing the physicians and other users. 

Ministry Health Care focuses mostly on general health care, and Marshfield Clinic focuses mostly on specialized fields, but there are areas where the two organizations' work overlaps. Vying for some of the same business has not impeded the groups from working together where they can to improve patient care overall, however. 

"We're proud of what were doing in terms of collaborating with competing organizations," Weider told me. "My counterpart, the CIO at Marshfield Clinic, and I are focused on how we set up these systems. We're contributing to the same electronic health record, and we're managing the same medication list. We have to make sure we have a medication list that everyone can contribute to."

Weider's spirit of collaboration is at work internally as well. Around the time the EHR deployment got started, Ministry Health Care named its first chief medical information officer. The CMIO, a physician who works for both the medical group and the IT team, has been "invaluable," Weider told me. When I asked whether having both a CIO and a CMIO on the EHR project created any turf confusion or counter-productive politics, he assured me it didn't.

"There's always role-defining," he said, "but I know the medical group has no design on anything other than serving the patients."

Collaboration has been at the heart of the EHR deployment, and it is one of its goals as well. The entire care team eventually will make use of it, and it is intended to be instrumental in attracting a new generation of physicians to the group. "This is more of a team-based, collaborative approach to patient care," Weider said. "The EHR is what brings everyone together."

The takeaway, it seems, is that a spirit of collaboration can be beneficial not only within teams but even among competitors, at least when it comes to EHR. - Caron