St. Tammany Parish Hospital (STPH) in Covington, La., today announced that it has selected RelayHealth as its partner to build a community-wide health information exchange (HIE) connecting its physicians for the benefit of its patients in western St. Tammany, eastern Tangipahoa and Washington parishes. STPH leads its region in quality and safety. It selected RelayHealth – which provides a variety of clinical, financial, and pharmacy focused connectivity solutions to other health systems – to provide connectivity and clinical applications for its HIE.
As part of a larger strategy in evolving the HIE and online enrollment, the not-for-profit, 222-bed community hospital plans to leverage RelayHealth as the hospital moves toward accountable care organization (ACO) status and increases the electronic services that it offers to its community physicians.
“State leaders are looking to STPH to lead local hospitals to collaborate and exchange data,” said Tim Lessing, senior vice president and chief financial officer, St. Tammany Parish Hospital. “RelayHealth will be our HIE partner to advance patient care and to reduce unnecessary expenses such as duplicate lab and radiology tests and paper-based faxing.”
Continuing, Lessing said, “We’re also relying on RelayHealth’s HIE solution to increase medication safety for our patients through ePrescribing, now proven to prevent incorrect dosing, illegible hand-writing and other types of errors through accurate transmissions, especially in the emergency room.”
With RelayHealth scheduled for rapid deployment this month, STPH’s acute and affiliated practice physicians will be better aligned with STPH and better positioned to qualify for government financial incentives as provided by ARRA. The STPH HIE will support:
- delivery of clinical documents,
- lab and test results (including discharge summaries and transcriptions of laboratory and radiology reports),
- electronic prescribing, and
- colleague-to-colleague secure messaging
The HIE network is powered by RelayClinical™ Platform, components of which form RelayClinical™ EHR, recently certified under the Drummond Group’s Electronic Health Records Office of the National Coordinator Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB) program to meet Stage 1 meaningful use requirements for complete electronic health record (EHR) ambulatory certification.
“Physicians want easy access in real time to a community-wide network in which their EHR systems could be populated with shared documents and to remove multiple faxing typically part of a practice’s daily routine,” Lessing said. “Our strategy is to establish the initial HIE capacity to help meet our physicians’ needs.”
“We’re honored to support St. Tammany Parish Hospital in building its HIE infrastructure to improve the care of its Northshore patient community,” said Jim Bodenbender, President, RelayHealth Connectivity Solutions. “St. Tammany is forward thinking in its recognition of the HIE as key to better, more cost-effective care. A HIE’s value lies in its ability to eliminate redundancy, which will drive down the cost of healthcare, while enabling the continuity of care necessary for consistently positive outcomes.”
