Earlier this week, Athens Regional Medical Center announced it will deploy a new EMR and practice management (PM) system to connect its hospital and affiliate physicians and patients. The news made me do a little bit of searching to find out how many healthcare organizations are implementing both systems in an integrated fashion.

Besides Athens Regional Medical Center, Catholic Independent Practice Association of Western New York, Portage Health in Michigan and Neighborhood Healthcare in Southern California are all implementing an integrated EMR/PM from a single vendor.

Golden Valley Medical Clinics in Clinton, Mo., is implementing a new EHR system and its vendor will integrate it with Golden Valley's existing PM system.

I'm sure there are others that were not captured by my surface search. Is it a trend? Industry analysts have been talking about the value of an integrated clinical, administrative and financial system. Health IT vendors' products and their services are moving in that direction as well through mergers and acquisitions, with Allscripts and Misys being the most well-known merger, and product development.

One thing that is apparent is hospitals are deploying EMRs with the purpose of connecting their affiliate physicians for true continuity of care. It makes sense to have an integrated system when you're sharing data with healthcare organizations outside the enterprise. Another thing that is driving the implementations is the goal of qualifying to receive the federal stimulus incentives. The relaxation of the Stark Law didn't make much of a dent in getting hospitals to extend their technology to community physicians, so it's good to know that the incentives are driving adoption.