Western Pennsylvania Health Systems Launch Bold HIE Initiative

The next step will be to have the EHRs ingest the CCD, but many policies need to be in place to monitor the use of the data beforehand, says Carleton. In the future, physicians will receive alerts within the EHR if there is extra information in the HIE.

A possible future use for ClinicalConnect that Thomas McGill, M.D., vice president of quality and safety at Butler Health System, and chair of the ClinicalConnect quality subcommittee, finds exciting involves assessing diagnostic imaging radiation exposure that patients receive across multiple care settings. “If someone had gotten care at a number of places, it’s actually only something like a health information exchange that could sum up those radiation exposures across the region, and maybe across the nation eventually,” he says. McGill recently saw a patient who had 80 cat scans in five years, and says that an HIE like ClinicalConnect can provide exposure information that could lead clinicians to take different approaches.