Oracle Cerner on Thursday announced that the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is enabling distribution of addiction treatment and recovery support content with its electronic health record and Xealth’s digital therapeutics platform.

WHY IT MATTERS

The EHR integration with the digital prescribing platform enables clinicians to send personalized therapeutic content to their patients throughout recovery. 

Within their workflows, clinicians can respond to and anticipate patient needs. They can access a central content repository and send patients reading materials, exercise plans, workshops and more. 

Patients can access these resources on the patient portal. The content is also accessible during in-person or online appointments.

With the new integration, clinicians can also access an analytics dashboard that provides insights and reports on how their patients are engaging with the content.

THE LARGER TREND

Hazelden Betty Ford is the nation's largest nonprofit system of addiction treatment, mental health care, recovery resources, and related prevention and education services. Because addiction is both a one-day-at-a-time commitment and a lifelong journey, the health system offers a full suite of recovery support.

Oracle Cerner and Xealth have collaborated on digital health operations and tools since 2020 as part of a growing trend to increase the efficacy of patient engagement in healthcare, particularly remote healthcare. 

With the complex challenges of addiction and mental health, recovery coaches need tools to respond to individual patient needs beyond in-patient care. With the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth and digital health innovators have been pressed to deliver care remotely,  

With the new EHR integration, Hazelden Betty Ford can better assess its patients between visits and appointments and help overcome common barriers to treating addiction.  

ON THE RECORD

"Digital health content is a critical component of our care and support, and our collaboration with Oracle Cerner and Xealth is helping us get the right content to the right patients at the right time," said Deb Bauman, chief information officer and VP of technology services at Hazelden Betty Ford, in a statement.

"We welcome the opportunity to help deepen the connection between patients and care teams by simplifying the process of bringing digital resources to people when and how they need them, getting more patients engaged and enabling more personalized, meaningful care," added Mike McSherry, CEO and co-founder of Xealth.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.