[url=]Perspective: Leveraging HIE capabilities[/url] | Channel: | Source: Patty Enrado, NHINWatch.com | Date: October 6, 2008 | E-mail to a Friend
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Health information exchanges (HIEs) can leverage their capabilities to deliver value to other healthcare stakeholders, thereby increasing the quality of healthcare delivery in a cost-effective way, according to two HIE executive directors.
“The value proposition is going to change,” Robert Steffel, executive director of HealthBridge, told attendees of Axolotl’s 7th Annual Customer Conference in New York City last Thursday, October 2.
HealthBridge, a sustainable HIE operating in the Greater Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky region, delivers clinical messages through Axolotl’s clinical messaging system and manages the participants’ Master Patient Index. HealthBridge enables 2.38 million messages monthly.
“The reason we’re sustainable is that we have business discipline and focus on delivering value that customers will pay for,” Steffel said. “We save individual stakeholders’ money on result delivery.”
HealthBridge is driving greater utilization by leveraging its clinical messaging system investment. Steffel said that the next level of value creation is from delivery to repository – delivering data when and where it’s needed for care – for the purpose of population studies and research and analytics on full data for better patient care.
HealthBridge found a natural ally when a National Institute of Health grant renewal included HealthBridge to help support a regional, multi-hospital acute stroke network. The University of Cincinnati’s stroke team holds data use agreements and collects stroke data from the same hospitals that participate in HealthBridge.
Using Axolotl’s virtual health record, HealthBridge has been able to identify stroke patients and cross-walk their medical records. HealthBridge first created the process to streamline the result delivery, with hospitals understanding the value and paying for it. “We pull data together in a patient-centric view so other shareholders will find value,” he said.
Quality Health Network (QHN), an HIE serving Mesa County in Western Colorado, was established to optimize the health status of its community, improve provider access to patient medical data, improve efficiency and eliminate redundancy in the healthcare system and increase patient and provider satisfaction.
Rocky Mountain Health Plan (RMHP), the Mesa County Physicians IPA (MCPIPA ), the two local hospitals and Hilltop Community Resources founded and funded QHN.
America’s Health Insurance Plans bestowed its Most Innovative Disease Management Program in the U.S.A. award in 2006 to Rocky Mountain Health Plan and the Mesa County Physicians IPA. The program, however, moved its data manually, was paper based and was not scalable, said QHN’s executive director Dick Thompson.
QHN leveraged its capabilities, powered by Axolotl’s technology, to assist RMHP and MCPIPA’s disease management program in a 24-month plan to improve data access.
QHN electronically collected and routed clinical data and securely connected providers to deliver low-cost access. Through its Web-based chronic care registries, QHN was able to analyze the data, identify candidates for diabetes, manage the list cost-effectively and deliver outcome reports. The program has also been able to automate health plan incentive reporting.
“Hospitals and doctors understand the value,” Thompson said. “Health information exchange is the facilitator.” |
发表于 2008-10-8 08:23:20
