November 17, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
Today Verizon announced that in January it will issue medical identity credentials to 2.3 million U.S. physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners—absolutely free. These credentials will be able to be used to universally access health IT applications and platforms, such as electronic medical records, e-prescribing services, and HIEs, including the cloud-based Verizon Health Information Exchange.
November 3, 2010
blog
When we think of health information exchanges, we usually picture regional efforts at collaboration across multiple provider organizations. And most articles about HIEs focus on the governance, privacy and security and funding issues they all must address. But there is another type of HIE quietly developing, one that is sponsored and run by a single health system. I just came across a great description of one by executives of five-hospital Main Line Health (MLH) in Pennsylvania.
October 6, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Non-profit regional health information exchange CareSpark, based in Kingsport, Tenn., serves the central Appalachian region, in a service area encompassing 34 counties in southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. Since 2005, the rural HIE has gotten half of the population (400,000 people) on_board to participate and has doubled EMR adoption and e-prescribing in the region. CareSpark’ Provider Relations Coordinator Pat Pope spoke with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo about CareSpark’s population health initiatives and sustainability model.
September 30, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Michigan Health Connect got its initial start in July 2009 when a few health systems in West Michigan using Medicity’s Novo Grid (Salt Lake City, Utah) decided to share health information. The collaborative was formalized in March 2010 with five main health systems as stakeholders. Doug Dietzman, at the time a program manager with one of the stakeholders Spectrum Health, worked in the beginning stages to deploy Medicity and helped facilitate the burgeoning collaborative. Once Michigan Health Connect incorporated, Dietzman stepped into the executive director role. He recently spoke with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo about his HIE’s value-add strategy, as well as his mantra of not trying to do it all.
September 29, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
As the health information exchange (HIE) concept evolves forward across the U.S. healthcare industry, leaders of different HIE organizations are pursuing divergent strategies that meet the needs of their regions. But a key, largely unresolved, issue around the sustainability of funding remains common across the sector.
September 29, 2010 Chuck Appleby
article
With a dense population that swells to twice its size every day of the week, Manhattan is an especially tough proving ground for the health information exchange concept. Yet the New York Clinical Health Information Exchange has succeeded in building a viable provider network that ties major Manhattan hospitals to those in surrounding areas, as well as ambulatory and homecare agencies, a health plan and nursing homes.
September 1, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
The Utah Health Information Network (UHIN) got its start in 1993 as an electronic administrative exchange, sharing claims, remits, eligibility orders, and other HIPAA-compliant data exchanges, and now covers 90 percent of the medical providers in Utah. Its clinical HIE (cHIE) is in the early stages of bringing its community’s major stakeholders online, which include HCA/MountainStar, IASIS, Intermountain Healthcare, and University of Utah Health Sciences Center (based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah; Franklin, Tenn.; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Salt Lake City, Utah, respectively). UHIN’s cHIE was recently the first HIE to be certified by the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission’s (EHNAC) Health Information Exchange Accreditation Program (HIEAP).
August 26, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
When Fremont Area Medical Center (FAMC) in Fremont, Neb., pondered its journey toward meaningful use, their central goal was health information exchange (HIE) in and around its county, Dodge County. In addition to its 202-bed hospital, FAMC employs one physician practice and has several other independent, affiliated practices.
July 20, 2010 Kurt Ullman
article
The Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) started in the mid-'90s as a proof-of-concept initiative to share data between two separate emergency departments (ED) in Indianapolis. Although geographically only about three miles apart, they had very distinct patient profiles. Based at the Regenstrief Institute on the Indiana University Medical Center campus in Indianapolis, the INPC links together the medical records of physician offices, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities statewide. Currently, there are more than 30 different hospital systems, as well as public health and other entities, sharing data across the state.
July 20, 2010 Karen van Wagner and Michael R. Solomon
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North Texas Specialty Physicians (NTSP), an independent practice association based in Forth Worth, has been working with healthcare organizations across North Texas to build an HIE known as SandlotConnect. NTSP Executive Director Karen Van Wagner, Ph.D. lays out four key strategies that appear to have been successful in winning broad and sustained acceptance by clinicians.
July 13, 2010 Mark Hagland
article
Dick Taylor, M.D., is CMIO of the Oregon Region of the Portland, Ore.-based Providence Health and Services, a regional integrated healthcare system that encompasses 28 hospitals located from Alaska to Southern California. The Oregon Region encompasses eight hospitals in the state of Oregon. Taylor spoke recently with HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland about his activities around health information exchange (HIE) within the Providence organization.
July 7, 2010 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
article
Last week Quality Health Network (QHN) CEO Dick Thompson spoke with HCI Associate Editor Jennifer Prestigiacomo about how the health information exchange was using its Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program award, issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, to broaden its reach to more than 20 hospitals and attendant physicians in the 40,000 square miles of Western Colorado. In part two of that interview, Thompson discusses some of QHN’s strategies for success.
