Transforming Continuity of Care in Rural France

Mayenne Hospital Group, a network of public hospitals and medical facilities in northwestern France, uses InterSystems HealthShare® to power its MayVilleHop healthcare coordination platform. MayVilleHop streamlines clinician communications and collaboration, improving continuity of care and reducing unnecessary emergency room visits. The platform enhances care quality and patient experiences especially in rural communities where healthcare resources are limited.

HealthShare unifies disparate data from independent EHR systems into a single, longitudinal health record, making it easy for healthcare professionals to exchange patient information and coordinate care. MayVilleHop eliminates outdated communications methods like emails, faxes, and telephone calls, speeding up care delivery and reducing patient and clinician frustration.

With just 60 residents per square kilometer, Mayenne is one of the most sparsely populated areas in France. The region faced significant healthcare challenges due to a severe shortage of medical professionals in outlying areas. In addition, fragmented EHR systems and various communications systems made it difficult for rural doctors and hospital clinicians to share data and coordinate care. As a result, patients were often sent to the emergency room for semi-urgent matters that could have been handled through telecare, squandering ER resources and impairing patient satisfaction.

Recognizing the strain on patients, providers, and the hospital system, the regional health authority convened a task force to improve care coordination, reduce emergency department overcrowding, and better serve rural residents. Comprised of hospital-based and private-practice doctors, the committee’s mission was to eliminate communications barriers and ensure patients—especially those in remote areas—receive prompt, appropriate care. The task force was charged with identifying functional requirements and technology partners for a new region-wide healthcare coordination platform.

After evaluating four potential options, the committee selected InterSystems HealthShare as the foundation for the MayVilleHop platform. HealthShare is a suite of solutions that work together to capture, share, and transform healthcare data from different sources.

InterSystems eagerness to engage the committee and understand their needs was instrumental in the decision. “InterSystems was the only company willing to partner with us to develop a solution that met our specific requirements,” explains Vincent Errera, Deputy Director, Mayenne Hospital Group. “The other vendors basically said, ‘this is our tool. You will use it. It is great.’ InterSystems took much more of a collaborative approach.”

MayVilleHop leverages several HealthShare solutions including:

• Unified Care Record to aggregate, normalize, and deduplicate disparate data into a longitudinal health record
• Care Community to streamline coordination and communications across care teams
• Health Insight to analyze clinical and population health data at speed and scale

InterSystems worked closely with the committee, configuring Unified Care Record views to streamline adoption.

HealthShare helps the hospital group break down interoperability barriers and information silos, simplify integration efforts, and accelerate time-to-value. “The care coordination situation in Mayenne was dire, so time was of the essence,” recalls Errera. “Thanks to InterSystems we were able to get a pilot program up and running in two hospitals in just four months.”

Based on the success of the pilot the group quickly expanded the scope and reach of the project, adding support for more features, disciplines, and hospitals. Today, MayVilleHop is connected to seven EHR systems encompassing over 340,000 patient records. It provides secure, real-time access to electronic health records and, in conjunction with several third-party tools, offers a wide range of care delivery and population health management capabilities including coordination and scheduling; messaging, notification, telehealth, and directory services; and cohorting, pathways, and data analytics functionality. The platform also provides secure access to Dossier Médical Partagé, France’s national medical record repository.

The MayVilleHop platform fundamentally transforms continuity of care throughout the Mayenne region, improving the health and wellbeing of the population while reducing healthcare delivery costs, delays, and inefficiencies.