OCHIN, which provides health IT services to more than 500 health clinics across 47 states, is selling its national headquarters in downtown Portland, Ore., and will take its staff and health IT services fully virtual.
Initially founded in 2000 with a vision to bring high-tech tools to six community health centers in Oregon, today OCHIN serves clinics working with at least 5 million diverse and medically complex patients across 47 states.
OCHIN said its goal is to continue advancing health equity and transforming healthcare delivery on a national scale, and that includes rethinking how it supports its ncreasingly national staff, as well as the regional needs of its members.
OCHIN offers a fully hosted, customized instance of Epic’s practice management and EHR solutions, and provides a full-service implementation with project management support, workflow optimization and training.
Prior to the pandemic, about half of OCHIN’s employees worked remotely, providing 20,000 health care providers in rural and underserved communities with access and technical assistance for a wide range of EHR, telehealth, and broadband services, as well as data-driven best practices. Now, hundreds of OCHIN employees across 37 states work virtually. OCHIN currently employs 272 people in the Portland metro region.
“At OCHIN, technology-driven change is in our DNA. Like many organizations, we shifted to a remote workforce in order to keep our staff and community safe throughout the pandemic,” said OCHIN CEO Abby Sears, in a statement. “What we’ve learned since then, is a fully virtual model suits us well. It allows us to offer more flexibility for our staff and more nimble, regional support for our members across multiple time zones. The future of both work and healthcare is virtual—this shift will help ensure that OCHIN stays on the forefront of that transformation as we grow.”
OCHIN also explained that throughout the pandemic it has expanded its on-premise data center capacity to meet its network’s growing need for IT support. With dedicated funding from Intel’s $50 million Pandemic Response Technology Initiative, OCHIN rapidly scaled to support 20,000 concurrent network users in the early months as the novel coronavirus spread.
OCHIN quickly built mobile applications and flexible EHR tools to assist hospitals and health authorities in managing COVID-19 patient overflow. Its team has helped roughly 74 percent of its member clinics to transform their previous in-person care delivery models with virtual visits in response to the pandemic—enabling access and continuity of care for more than 5 million active patients nationally.
