Harris Corporation has announced the implementation of CareAccord, Oregon’s statewide Health Information Exchange. CareAccord, which is administered by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), will enhance communications among Oregon healthcare providers, reduce duplicate orders, smooth transitions in care and support fulfillment of meaningful use requirements.“Providers will have the capacity to share vital medical history with specialists, labs and emergency departments. Patients will benefit from primary care physicians and specialists who can now exchange medical information electronically prior to scheduled appointments, improving patient safety and expanding the time patients have with their providers.”

CareAccord launched with Harris’ Direct Secure Messaging, a secure, point-to-point messaging system that enables registered providers to exchange information, including attachments containing patient data, using any device with Internet access.

Harris Direct Secure Messaging ensures secure delivery and receipt of messages, while providing the audit functions needed to share clinical information. It leverages a provider directory to connect users with other registered organizations and providers – minimizing duplication of care and enhancing care coordination and collaboration.

“CareAccord represents a win-win for both patients and providers,” said Carol Robinson, Oregon State Coordinator, Health Information Technology, OHA. “Providers will have the capacity to share vital medical history with specialists, labs and emergency departments. Patients will benefit from primary care physicians and specialists who can now exchange medical information electronically prior to scheduled appointments, improving patient safety and expanding the time patients have with their providers.”

OHA contracted with Harris Healthcare Solutions after receiving federal funding to plan and implement statewide HIE services through the ONC State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program. In a competitive bidding process that involved seven HIE vendors, OHA selected Harris because of its expertise in building state HIEs and enterprise level systems for commercial and government customers, including the Florida HIE, Department of Veterans Affairs, ONC and Health First.

“Harris enables CareAccord providers across Oregon to securely share patient information, to make it available when and where it is needed, and to deliver the best possible care to patients,” said Jim Traficant, president, Harris Healthcare Solutions.

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Arizona selected Mosaica Partners for the firm’s HIE expertise, knowledge of the State HIE Collaborative Agreement Program (SHIECAP) and prior experience in working with the state. Previously, Mosaica Partners assisted Arizona in developing a state grant program to support the planning of regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and assisted each of the six grant awardees during their planning process. The firm also wrote the State of Arizona’s RHIO Formation Guide.

“Arizona is making significant progress in enabling statewide exchange of health information, and it’s important that the strategic and operational plans accurately reflect that activity,” said Laura Kolkman, RN, MS, FHIMSS, president of Mosaica Partners. “We’re honored that Arizona has chosen us to help with this important step, and it’s a pleasure to be working with the state once again.”

The state’s initial plans, which outlined Arizona’s approach to utilizing $9.3 million in federal funds to enable the exchange of health information within the state, were submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and subsequently approved in March 2011 by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC). Under the terms of SHIECAP, Arizona and other participants must submit annual HIE plan updates to HHS for approval.

The updated plans will form the basis for coordinating and communicating Arizona’s progress in adopting health information technology and facilitating information exchange with the federal government, various state agencies, healthcare providers throughout the state and consumers.

In addition to having deep experience in HIE planning, formation and operations, Kolkman and Bob Brown, Mosaica’s vice president of professional services, co-authored The Health Information Exchange Formation Guide: The Authoritative Guide for Planning and Forming an HIE in Your State, Region, or Community. The book, considered by many to be the essential guide to HIE planning, was named 2011 Book of the Year by the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS).

The federal government has invested more than half a billion dollars to set up HIEs to facilitate the transfer of health data between providers. But with progress slow and many of these HIEs not ready to launch, providers are seeking immediate ways to exchange health information. For example, some larger health systems have contracted with IT vendors to develop their own systems. This development has led industry analysts to ponder whether nonprofit regional and state HIEs are already obsolete. Some also are concerned that private HIEs will be run with a focus on margin and competitive advantage and drain customers and resources from public HIEs, which are tasked with a broader mandate and strive to serve the greater good.

A private HIE operator in Harrisburg, Pa., Pinnacle Health System, attempts to bridge this gap by using the profits from its most successful HIE functions to invest and support the other services that are not profitable but improve healthcare.

According to Harry Rhodes, MBA, RHIA, CHPS, CPHIMS, FAHIMA, director of practice leadership at AHIMA, state HIEs ability to include a vast array of stakeholders in the conversation can help frame complex issues like consent, exchange authorization and even technical issues like patient record locator services.

“It makes sense to me that some public entities bring all of those (private) entities together, where there really isn’t a motivation otherwise,” said Steven Roth, vice president and chief information officer with Pinnacle.

Advances in technology, health reform laws, and federal stimulus funds have facilitated the creation of health information exchanges (HIEs) across medical communities and are promising to make clinical data more accessible to providers at the point of care.

HIEs are designed to aggregate and move patient information electronically between various healthcare information systems. The ultimate goal is to give providers the data required to better manage the health of individual patients and their patient populations. An efficient HIE infrastructure results in safe, timely, and effective data retrieval in real time and at the point of care.

While the concept of HIEs sounds great, the reality for providers is that soon they will be flooded with vast amounts of data that will need to be identified and interpreted. Though new interoperability standards are being introduced, information will still be presented in a variety of formats, such as ICD-10, SNOMED, LOINC, or RxNorm. In order to effectively and efficiently treat patients, physicians will need tools to make sense of the available data and indentify the relevant elements for a given clinical encounter.

For example, if you are a physician examining a patient, you may access an HIE to obtain a more complete picture of the patient’s medical history, including previous lab and test results, medications, and diagnoses. Depending on the complexity of the patient’s health and treatment, the amount of data could be overwhelming. Manually sifting through mountains of information could be tedious and pertinent data could be easily missed.

Providers need complete patient records to support clinical decision-making and facilitate care coordination. Data sharing is also critical for achieving Meaningful Use, especially as the program moves to Stage 2. Furthermore, health information exchange is a cornerstone for new reimbursement models that emphasize outcomes and accountability for patient health over traditional patient encounter volume. The incoming sea of data has great potential for improving patient and population health, but only if providers have efficient tools to intelligently identify and interpret the relevant information.

Dave Lareau is Chief Executive Officer at Medicomp Systems. The MEDCIN Engine, a robust clinical data engine was developed by Medicomp, and is embedded in leading EHRs throughout the world. The engine uses Clinically Intelligent Filtering Technology to present clinicians with relevant details at the point of care based on individual patient encounter. This prompting facilitates diagnosis, helps providers develop the most appropriate treatment plans, and provides critical data required for compliance and reimbursement.

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All State of Texas agencies, including state, county and local government offices, public education and other public entities in Texas can now purchase EHR Doctors’ MediBridge.Net solutions, a Certified HIE solution, at discounted pricing through DIR’s Information and Communication Technology Cooperative Contracts Program.

The DIR Program leverages Texas’s purchasing power to negotiate competitive discounts with vendors, saving taxpayers money.  In fiscal year 2009, the program resulted in over $1 billion in technology sales and saved taxpayers more than $170 million. “EHR Doctors is pleased to join the DIR Program, thereby allowing MediBridge.Net solutions to assist Texas entities in meeting proposed requirements for Meaningful Use 2 and 3, making true interoperability a reality,” states Gerard Reeder, President and CEO of EHR Doctors.

As a pioneer in the HIE space, EHR Doctors on-boarded the first hospital in Texas, Midland Memorial, to a bi-directional health information exchange over the Nationwide Health Information Network. During that process, EHR Doctors developed MediBridge.Net to meet the demanding needs of healthcare entities by providing flexible, scalable and standards based solutions that can be integrated into multi-vendor systems. Currently, MediBridge.Net solutions are bringing “Interoperability to Life(TM)” in hospitals around the country. This newly awarded DIR Contract better positions EHR Doctors to provide this same level of service to the State of Texas.

Many hospitals and healthcare organizations find that EHR Doctors’ products fit organically into their enterprise. EHR Doctors also offers a variety of products and services to meet the demanding needs of commercial businesses interests, including their recently introduced MediBridge.Net HIE, an ARRA Meaningful Use Certified solution for clinical information exchange with providers and patients. The solution is designed to provide clinicians and other members of the care team with the right information at the right time by making patient information available across organizational boundaries and venues of care.

“Our new web site has begun generating excellent feedback from the medical community and consumers for both its content and readability,” said Dr. Jan Lee, Executive Director of the Delaware Health Information Network.  “We developed this platform not only to offer information, but to set the stage for giving patients direct access to their aggregated health data. Our goal is to expand the site to provide secure and direct access to medical information for both the consumer and medical professionals.”

At DHIN.org, medical consumers can answer the question “Does your Doc DHIN?” to determine if their physicians participate in Delaware’s health information exchange.  They can watch a video about how DHIN helps to provide a more comprehensive view of medical results and ultimately supports better medical care.  One new section on the site describes how personal health records (PHRs) can help consumers engage more deeply in their healthcare, providing a repository for important medical information provided by a number of sources including their physician(s).

Physicians can use the new DHIN site to enroll as a member of DHIN and have access to a growing network of patient-level information.  Existing members can access on-line forms to update provider access to the network and conveniently communicate feedback to DHIN staff.  The goal of the site is to serve as a valued source of information with ever evolving and increasing utility for consumers, Delaware’s medical providers and the staff of DHIN.

“HIT application companies can now leapfrog past competitors as they utilize the unstructured clinical data transformed by Health Fidelity REVEAL,” said Dan Riskin, M.D., CEO of Health Fidelity.  ”Customers of these HIT application companies — hospitals, health systems and IDNs — will be able to act upon the fully codified record of a patient’s health, while benefiting from streamlined workflow.”

Using that newly codified information accelerates the time-to-value of several core healthcare challenges: electronic health record adoption and use, quality measurement and reporting, care coordination, efficiency and health information exchange, Riskin said.

Health Fidelity developed REVEAL based upon the understanding that to improve patient outcomes and leverage workflow efficiencies, healthcare organizations (HCO) must unlock the value of clinical information locked in unstructured form.  An estimated 80 percent of these data are trapped within the notes of physicians, nurses and care managers, making it difficult for applications to deliver the full, detailed record of a patient that HCOs need in order to achieve gains in quality, coordination of care, HIE interoperability and accountable care.

Based on more than two decades of NLP experience, many of the earliest clinical NLP patents and extensive peer-reviewed validation, Health Fidelity REVEAL works with knowledge-based terminologies to generate highly granular codified data in a structured, interoperable format.  As a cloud-based service, REVEAL accepts a wide range of unstructured clinical data and can produce structured, codified information using industry standard terminologies (e.g., SNOMED).  The codified information is made available in both fine and composite granularity within interoperable data structures, enabling that content to be readily consumable in any clinical workflow.

“Data-driven clinical decision making is accelerated when clinicians leverage technology to tap into a complete map of a patient’s health, where every element of a patient’s health is revealed, understood and applied,” said Dr. Riskin.  ”Health Fidelity delivers that capability on a commercial scale, meeting the needs of both application developers and HCOs.”

Health Fidelity REVEAL enables applications that help HCOs increase efficiency, enhance care quality and facilitate information exchange through innovations that include automatic extraction of quality and case management metrics, reduced manual coding, real-time access to information, utilization of narrative note content, and predictive modeling in response to a massive increase in data clarified, understood and available for application.

“Healthcare organizations committed to achieving meaningful use, ICD-10 conversion and other quality improvement efforts can capitalize on the data they already have to perform more accurate analytics,” Dr. Riskin said.  ”Doing so will reduce costs, while improving performance, quality and efficiency.”

“Our goal at Indian River Medical Center is to continually improve the outstanding healthcare we provide in our communities, while at the same time expanding the services we offer to our employed and affiliated physicians,” said William Neil, CIO, IRMC. “RelayHealth will help us to better engage patients in their healthcare for improved outcomes, while creating a compelling value proposition for physicians: less paper and enhanced efficiency.”

Neil continued, “As a community with a large number of seasonal residents, it’s vitally important that Indian River Medical Center can securely share patient information locally and with physicians in a seasonal resident’s summer home area – without regard to which EHR a physician uses, or even if they do not have an EHR. RelayHealth’s vendor- and payer-neutral solution enables physicians no matter what system they use to share information.”

IRMC will provide its physicians and patients with RelayHealth’s proven, bi-directional, closed-loop orders and results, secure messaging, and patient engagement services. IRMC also plans to connect to the state of Florida’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) through RelayHealth.

“Hospitals and health systems face a number of challenges managing health information. Disparate EHRs, connectivity with enterprise, community, regional and national HIEs and the ability to effectively engage patients in their care are some of the more pressing challenges that robust, secure connectivity can help address,” explained Jeff Felton, president, RelayHealth. “The right interoperable connectivity is key to addressing these issues. RelayHealth provides the technology and flexibility that will enable IRMC to address physician alignment, manage care coordination and better prepare the organization as they work toward meeting meaningful use objectives.”

IVANS AuditDocs™, is a software solution for fast, secure, electronic submission of Medicare audit documentation requests.

• Reduce risk and ensure audit deadlines are met by uploading and sending medical records electronically to review contractors via HIPAA-compliant transmission
• Verify documents were sent and received through a robust dashboard that provides detailed document tracking, transactions history and archiving
• Decrease expenses by cutting down on printing and shipping costs and pay only for the document submission services that are used
• Access AuditDocs via IVANS LIME HIE plan or integrate the solution into an existing electronic medical record, Practice Management or RAC Management solution

IVANS is currently the only CMS approved Health Information handler to offer this type of compliance solution to Amerinet members through an Executive Resources agreement.

This contract is effective through February 28, 2015.

The EHR Doctors CCD Generator, when completely integrated into a Hospital system, identifies, manages, and configures the critical pieces of a Patient’s personal electronic medical information into a machine-processable, human-readable, holistic format. The CCD generator provides hospitals with a truly interoperable health record that can easily be shared between locations for purposes ranging from transitions in care to releases of information for adjudication of insurance claims and audits.

EHR Doctors successfully implemented the CCD generator into Ministry Health Care multi–vendor environment which includes GE Centricity Enterprise and Meditech clinical systems.

Steve Pelton, Vice President, Enterprise Applications at Ministry Health Care found: “During Ministry’s self-certification process we were looking for a CCD which was ONC-ATB certified, capable of being quickly implemented, feature-rich, and vendor neutral. The ability to query and receive a patient’s summary record from multiple EHR systems (MEDITECH, GE, etc) is a key step on Ministry’s meaningful use roadmap.”

The capability to generate a CCD between disparate systems is the foundation for Health Information Exchange (HIE). “A interoperable CCD is the currency of HIE exchange going forward,” said Gerard Reeder, President of EHR Doctors.