Rush Health begins ambitious health info exchange project

Rush Health has gone live with a private health info exchange project to share information with three of its hospitals and 800 physician providers.

The health info exchange project platform from InterSystems will support the collection, use, sharing and analysis of financial, clinical and resource utilization data, as well as care coordination, the sufferer experience and provider engagement as the industry shifts away from fee-for-service and into value-based care.

Rush Health offers care in the area of Chicago, operating 4 hospitals with a total network of 1,100 physicians. The agency uses both Epic and Allscripts electronic health records (EHRs) systems.

The HIE is a key part of an interoperability strategy to support standard transition of care workflows across the network of delivery system, claims CIO Julie Bonello, and to explain the best inoperability tools and standards to support the different kinds of providers and their EHRs.

The HIE also targets admission and discharge notifications for care managers to follow up with sufferer, and over time will link to other exchanges and networks to give physicians a longitudinal view of patients’ medical histories.

“As more contracts shift to value-based care, it is significant for our providers and care team to have convenient access to correct clinical information along with actionable clinical notifications integrated within their EHR,” Bonello elaborates. “Our aim is to ensure interoperability tools support our new care delivery workflows that connect the whole care team.”

By using the HIE, clinicians will be capable to view their aggregated sufferer data within their own EHR, even when the information comes from a different EHR. This will spare physicians the requirement to alter their clinical workflows or sign on to an extra application. The HIE also will support real-time alerts and notifications.

To support providers shifting to value-based care, Rush Health will assist them negotiate payer contracts and manage performance like clinical metrics, utilization, patient satisfaction, care coordination patient experience and charges.

“As a private HIE, we need to use all the information to tell us how patients are doing,” Bonello explains. “We’ll use HIE as an intelligence hub building rules to monitor quality and resources. We can use analytics to recognize patients at risk and trigger events in the HIE to notify providers and care management teams for follow-up. We are using our HIE to support our performance across the network.”

For now, although, the HIE is in an early stage, and a clinically driven governance structure is being established to guide the project and learn from lessons experienced. Early pilots are examining use of the emerging FHIR interoperability standard and application programming interfaces.

There will be much trial and error as processes and tools aren’t yet mature, Bonello claims. “We are talking about data, quality and metric standards that remain relatively new so this is very much an innovative journey.”