Information and integration

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine

Americans want—and increasingly expect—connectivity with their physician’s office. A growing cadre of evidence bears this out, including a recent survey from Intuit Health. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they would use a secure online communication tool if doing so made it easier to get lab results, request appointments, pay medical bills and communicate with their doctor’s office. Healthcare organizations also strive to integrate information sources to improve communication among clinicians as well as patients, and free them from administrative chores.

Can patient portals be tools of information integration? Yes, said two speakers at a webinar titled “Improving Care Coordination with Online Services.”

Mason General Hospital in Shelton, Wash., has designed its EMRs to interface relevant patient information to other facilities’ EMRs, said Eric Moll, chief administrative officer at Mason, a critical access facility that operates eight clinics and employs more than 20 physicians. In Jacksonville, Fla., Brooks Rehabilitation is using a patient portal to aggregate information from several information systems to make sure its post-acute patients and their caregivers have the information they need to coordinate care, reported Karen Green, Brooks CIO.

Mason moved its information systems platform onto a Meditech Magic EMR, and transitioned clinics to a GE Centricity EMR to coordinate care and information among providers within its service area. The CAH has implemented Microsoft’s Healthvault Community Connect to stay connected with patients as they receive care from providers outside its care area. Online access to summaries and discharge instructions reduces the likelihood of lost information, and patients’ ability to pre-register for visits saves patient time and “eliminates the dreaded clipboard,” said Moll.

Brooks Rehabitation, an independent, post-acute-care facility, align its services around areas including stroke, brain injury and spinal cord injuries, and has four different information systems, said Green. Sharing information across the care continuum and beyond is both vital and challenging: “Great coordination of care has to occur,” she said. For example, a stroke patient may go to an ER, then an acute-care hospital, then to rehab and may go on to home care. “The need for interoperability has increased and our need to collect data and aggregate it has increased as well.”

Brooks was an early adopter of HealthVault Community Connect and is piloting a patient portal with stroke and spinal cord injury patients. Patients and families can get an electronic record of their care and discharge instructions from the Meditech EMR system (via an interface engine) and consenting patients can also share information with other providers.

The effort is as much a pilot for providers as for patients, Green said. “We have to educate staff about what this is and how it benefits the patients. This is new territory for staff, our patients and our community.”

This probably applies to organizations nationwide as they work to integrate patient information from ever more sources.

Mary Stevens, editor
mstevens@cmio.net