Vanguard Health Systems, a Nashville-based for-profit IDN with hospitals in Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas announced their partnership with Nashville, Tenn.-based Medicity to rapidly deployhealth information exchange (HIE) technology to physician practices across Vanguard’s four regions.

Following a successful deployment in one region in 2009, Vanguard contracted with Medicity to bring the entire health system onto the Novo Grid to improve provider communication and continuity of care across acute and ambulatory settings. Vanguard now has more than 850 physicians active on the Grid across its four regions with approximately 46,000 clinical results, reports and orders moving through the Vanguard system each week.

Medicity’s flexible technology has enabled each Vanguard region to leverage the same technology infrastructure to pursue the implementation strategy best suited to its market. For example, Texas has prioritized result and report delivery to paper-based practices, while Massachusetts has focused exclusively on rolling out the Grid implementation for EHR users and is implementing the bidirectional exchange of orders to support lab business. Vanguard is currently exchanging health information with a wide variety of EHRs.