Evolving and expanding; Wash. county's only hospital anchors network.(St. Joseph's Hospital (Phoenix, Arizona))(Company Profile)

Modern Healthcare, October, 2005 by Conn, Joseph

Byline: Joseph Conn

In Washington state, the Whatcom Health Information Network, or HInet, began humbly in the mid-1990s as a provider of Internet-based messaging services subsidized by just two organizations. One was 226-bed St. Joseph Hospital, Bellingham, the only hospital in Whatcom County, population 167,000, and the other was the Northwest Washington Medical Bureau, the region's then-dominant payer. (The bureau, a not-for-profit Blue Shield plan, has since merged into Regence Blue Shield, which dropped its ownership interest in the network last fall.)

In a series of expansions, the network now offers about 300 clinicians throughout the county read-only access to the hospital's electronic medical-records system with information on both inpatient...

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