Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH) today announced that it would participate in The BJC Collaborative, a partnership among health care systems throughout Illinois, Missouri and Eastern Kansas.

Memorial Health System is one of the founding members of The BJC Collaborative, which formed in October 2012. The other founders are BJC HealthCare (St. Louis, Mo.), Saint Luke’s Health System (Kansas City, Mo.) and CoxHealth (Springfield, Mo.).

The Collaborative was founded to improve the quality and efficiency of health care in the region. Blessing Health System in Quincy, Ill., joined the Collaborative in May 2013, under the sponsorship of Memorial Health System. SIH becomes the sixth Collaborative member to join the group since its inception and joins under BJC HealthCare’s sponsorship.

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

A significant benefit of the BJC Collaborative is enhanced access to St. Louis health-care resources, where SIH patients are frequently referred for specialized medical care or treatment. BJC HealthCare includes Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine.

The four founding members of the Collaborative have nearly 5,000 hospital beds, 52,600 employees and 6,933 employed and affiliated physicians across their adjacent service areas. The SIH System has 285 licensed beds, 316 medical staff physicians and 3,200 employees.

The BJC Collaborative offers SIH the opportunity to participate in multiple existing initiatives, to the benefit of SIH and 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.