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One of the largest patient databases in the country soon will be created, thanks to the commercialization of Marshfield Clinic's homegrown electronic health record system.

The Wisconsin health system recently offered up its CattailsMD EHR, developed in-house over more than two decades, for commercial sale. The first taker was a neighboring health system -- Ministry Health Care of Milwaukee. Ministry has hospitals and medical groups in the northern part of Wisconsin, an area also served by Marshfield.

Ministry's implementation of the system, expected to take about three years, will result in a database with more than 2.5 million patient records from both Ministry and Marshfield, the organizations said. The two health systems will be connected, creating a regional health information organization with interoperability between all of both systems' facilities. Ministry and Marshfield combined have 1,000 doctors.

Pete Sanderson, MD, director of medical informatics operations for Ministry Health Care, said part of the attractiveness of the Cattails system was the ability to share patient data with Marshfield, with whom Ministry has had a relationship for more than a century.

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