Sarah Bush Lincoln has joined The BJC Collaborative, LLC , a partnership among healthcare systems throughout Illinois, Missouri and Eastern Kansas.

 While remaining independent, member and participant organizations collaborate to achieve savings, implement clinical programs and services to improve access to and quality of healthcare for patients, lower healthcare costs and create additional efficiencies that will benefit patients and communities.

BJC HealthCare (St. Louis, Mo.), Memorial Health System (Springfield, IL), Saint Luke’s Health System (Kansas City, Mo.) and CoxHealth (Springfield, Mo.) founded the Collaborative in October 2012 to improve the quality and efficiency of health care in the region. Other health systems in the collaborative include Blessing Health System in Quincy, IL, Southern Illinois Healthcare in Carbondale, IL, and Decatur Memorial Hospital, Decatur, IL.

A significant benefit of the BJC Collaborative is being able to tap into the best practices developed by these organizations to impact Sarah Bush Lincoln patients and its employees. While all of the Collaborative members are members of Voluntary Hospitals of America (VHA) Sarah Bush Lincoln will be able to combine its purchasing power when it needs to replace expensive equipment.

The Collaborative comprises 6,500 hospital beds, nearly 60,000 employees and 7,600 employed and affiliated physicians across their adjacent service areas. Sarah Bush Lincoln has 145 licensed beds, 175 medical staff members and 2,450 employees.

The BJC Collaborative offers Sarah Bush Lincoln the opportunity to participate in multiple existing initiatives, to the benefit of the communities it serves. Those initiatives include:

• Population Health Management – population health information and assessment, physician recruitment and engagement strategies, including Accountable Care Organizations and medical home development.
• Clinical and Service Quality – performance improvement, staff development and training, including eLearning, management and leadership development, clinical skills training, clinical decision support, safety event reporting and emergency preparedness.
• Capital Asset Management – supply chain relationships, facilities design, clinical engineering, technology evaluation, energy conservation and facilities management.
• Financial Services – capital resource evaluation analysis, treasury options, revenue cycle, business intelligence and actuarial expertise.
• Information Systems and Technology – meaningful use of health IT, data center management, data warehousing, software applications, hardware configurations and emerging technologies, data security and patient confidentiality.