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.”

 

Why practices are confronting difficulties to exchange patient records

Medical record administrators are sustaining to have difficulties exchanging patient records with other providers.

Data exchange of patient records is specifically difficult when getting providers are not on the same electronic health records (EHRs) as the sender, in accordance to results of a survey conducted in the month of January by Black Book Research, which discovered that more than 40% of responding administrators admitted to record exchange challenges.

Those mixed outcomes come even though vendors of EHRs are reconfiguring systems to better enable data exchange. The survey also measured how well respondents’ electronic health records (EHRs) vendors are optimizing EHRs, including the use of the emerging FHIR interoperability standard, to better support HIE.

“As inpatient agencies execute optimized EHR software that uses FHIR to advance interoperability and HIE, the whole provider network gains the data exchanging functionality to better serve sufferers,” claims Doug Brown, managing partner at Black Book. “Physician groups continue to lack the financial and technical expertise to adopt complex EHRs which are necessary to attain higher reimbursements by public and private payers.”

• 70% of responding hospitals do not use patient records information outside of their own EHR because information from external providers isn’t made available in the EHR workflow.


• 22% of records administrators say transferred patient information isn’t presented in a usable format.


• 21% of hospital-based physicians say the data they view can’t be trusted for precision when sent between disparate information systems.

In all, more than 80% of independent physicians in the survey aren’t confident of having the technology and skills to manage the financial risk of quality payment programs.

Black Book also inquired how providers feel about their EHR vendor. Those ranked greatest are: Evident CPSI for hospitals with fewer than hundred beds; Cerner for community hospitals with 101-250 beds; Allscripts for facilities with more than 250 beds; and Cerner for hospital chains and integrated delivery systems.

 

Infor Healthcare Concentrates on Interoperability With Primary Investments in Infor Cloverleaf Suite

 Infor, a leading contributor of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and constructed for the cloud, today declared its commitment to helping agencies achieve interoperability objectives through important investments made in the Infor Cloverleaf Suite. Infor Cloverleaf is a market leading, enterprise-caliber integration engine that facilitates the movement of highly secure data through disparate systems within and outside the healthcare enterprise, and will assist the transition the healthcare industry to adopt the new HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Draft Interoperability Standard, and operate in a more modern, data-driven atmosphere.

Infor sustains to enhance the Infor Cloverleaf Integration Suite to support the emerging HL7 standard FHIR, and a primary pillar of this continued focus involves the appointment of Mark Weber to lead development for Infor Healthcare. "The healthcare industry's sustained to transformation is driving an ever greater requirement to optimize performance and value, and as a market leader for healthcare business systems, Infor is in a distinctive position to offer breakthrough business solutions to the industry," claimed Mike Poling, general manager, Infor Healthcare. "To accelerate the realization of this opportunity, the company is growing its investment in healthcare and appointing Mark Weber to Senior Vice President of Healthcare Development to further unify healthcare-focused solutions while maintaining a powerful alignment between Infor's core technologies and industry needs."