Case Study: Fort HealthCare achieves higher county health rankings and stronger patient engagement with Cerner ITWorks

Clinicians and others at Fort HealthCare are working with the Cerner ITWorks team to improve its community health ranking

Fort HealthCare, the dominant provider in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, partnered with Cerner’s ITWorks team to move from reactive care to a predictive, preventive model and to improve the county’s community health ranking. The organization faced challenges with health behaviors, care gaps and patient engagement—particularly obesity, physical inactivity and the need for better population-health management—to achieve its vision of being the healthiest community in the state.

Working with ITWorks, Fort HealthCare optimized its patient portal (direct scheduling, immediate lab releases, radiology within 72 hours, an immunization chart and Open Notes) and implemented HealtheRegistries for risk scoring, outreach and targeted interventions. The results: Jefferson County rose from 33rd to 8th in overall health rankings (2012–2016) and from 44th to 11th in health behaviors; adult obesity fell from 32% to 29% and physical inactivity from 22% to 17%; portal users increased 29% to over 11,000, and clinicians can now identify and close patient-care gaps more proactively.

Fort Healthcare

Mike Wallace

President and CEO