HIE Written Case Studies

Although the Mississippi Health Information Network was formally established in 2010, the statewide health information exchange (HIE) for Mississippi has an earlier origin. In 2007, Governor Haley Barbour established the Mississippi Health Information Infrastructure Task Force to determine how best to improve healthcare delivery in Mississippi using health information technology. Governor Barbour was responding to lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, which had destroyed the medical records of thousands of evacuees and disruptedthe medical information system throughout the coastal areas of the state in 2005.
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Operationalizing eReferrals across a multi-vendor, multispecialty, multi-region HIE is a real-world challenge few have successfully addressed. But Michigan Health Connect has succeeded using Medicity's iNexx™ platform and by promoting viral adoption of the iNexx referrals solution. Physician practices throughout Michigan are eliminating the referrals workflow bottleneck while promoting collaboration throughout the community. With iNexx, these practices are able to create secure care-team networks that enable eReferrals and collaboration and present a coherent picture of a patient's health to all members of the care team – and all at no cost to the provider office. Read More ...

Atlanta Women's Specialists implemented the Allscripts Professional EHR in 2002 and was able to establish electronic connectivity between their EHR and partners like Quest Diagnostics® Lab Information Systems, Genzyme Genetics, and LabCorp. However, they hadn’t established connectivity with Northside Hospital – their biggest trading partner, which continued to deliver information via fax and courier – because of the complexity of interfacing with multiple clinical systems within the hospital. To reduce costs, save staff time, improve the timeliness and quality of information, and truly capitalize on their Allscripts investment, AWS needed an interface from Northside into their EHR. Read More ...

Henry Mayo’s ongoing organizational objectives are to improve quality and patient safety and to provide compelling reasons for high-performing, patient-focused physicians to partner with the hospital. To support these goals, the hospital undertook a large IT initiative in 2007 – deploying 24 MEDITECH applications. Although they had this foundation in place, hospital administrators – recognizing that interoperability and digital exchange of clinical data would be a major factor in positioning themselves as facility of choice among physicians – determined that they needed a better way to share data. Read More ...

A primary goal of HSHS is care integration to create a seamless patient-care experience that breaks down traditional barriers between physicians and hospitals – leading to more efficient, higher-quality care. Charles Lucore, Executive Director of Prairie Heart Institute, an HSHS partner, notes, “With our care integration strategy, medical technology is not an end in itself. Electronic medical records, for example, help us put the needs of the patient first and create more efficiency.” Read More ...

CHS was losing its competitive edge in the market. Without the technology to facilitate electronic results delivery and discrete data integration into physician EHRs, CHS was losing its outpatient laboratory business to a major competitor. The development of point-to-point VPNs or individual EHR interfaces with each practice were too costly and not scalable options. CHS needed a way to electronically deliver clinical results and reports to its affiliated physicians securely without significant cost and IT investment requirements by either the hospitals or physician practices.
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As a result of the six hospitals’ merger in 2002, the newly formed DCHS IT environment included dramatic disparity in information systems and a best-of-breed vendor landscape. DCHS needed to empower clinicians with patient information from across the disparate systems in the enterprise in order to improve the quality of patient care, enhance care coordination, and reduce costs.
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The initial business challenge for Intermountain arose when national reference laboratory competitors began eating into Intermountain’s business. Competitors had the ability to interface electronic laboratory results directly to the physician practices while Intermountain did not. These tended to be the larger practices that had gone through the cost and effort of implementing EHRs and they wanted to see discrete data integration into their EHR without having to go out and get the data themselves. As these physician practices became increasingly more vocal about their dissatisfaction, Intermountain sought a solution with Medicity.
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DHIN’s vision was to develop a network to exchange real-time clinical information among all health care providers across the state as a way of improving patient outcomes and patient-provider relationships while reducing service duplication and the rate of increase in healthcare spending. Early on, DHIN identified data integrity – including a safe, secure and reliable network – as the highest priority for its stakeholders. Acknowledging the significant disparity in health information technology (HIT) adoption, DHIN wanted to meet clinicians where they were along the HIT adoption curve with low barriers to entry. The system needed to be flexible and responsive to meet the unique needs of Delaware’s delivery system. The core goal was to enable data to flow as quickly as patients flow from one point of care to another across the system. Read More ...

Early on, Spectrum Health recognized two key business issues. To compete in the reference laboratory market, Spectrum needed an outreach result-delivery solution that could be directly integrated with physician practices regardless of where they were on the technology adoption curve, as some providers had adopted an EHR while many others worked in paper-based practices. In addition, Spectrum faced a significant number of unhappy physicians who were overloaded with faxes and constant callbacks. At the time, Spectrum was sending nearly 6,000 faxes to 1,600 physicians every day and with no capability to filter faxes – which not only was expensive and inefficient, but left physicians with a significant workflow challenge. Spectrum needed to add value, reduce costs, increase provider satisfaction, replace paper transactions, and enhance patient care. regional and statewide connectivity in the future. Read More ...