HIE Chronicles Part IV: All aboard!
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About 130,000 patients have already opted in to currentcare, Rhode Island’s health information exchange (HIE), piloted by the Providence-based Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI). In addition, two of three hospital chains in the state and one stand-alone hospital are in agreement or inking deals with the nonprofit organization to flow data into the HIE. Conversations are starting with others, said Gary Christensen, COO and CIO at RIQI.
In addition to the hospitals, four state laboratories will stream data into the system and the HIE’s internally built integration, with Surescripts providing medication histories, according to Christensen.
The three-hospital Care New England Health System will be among the first hospitals to share data, said Cedric Priebe, MD, CIO and senior vice president of the Care New England Health System. Care New England is about to sign a lab data-sharing partnership agreement with RIQI.
As a practicing pediatrician, Priebe said sometimes it was hard for the hospital to get access to his records about patients who receive care from a community hospital. “An initial benefit to all participants will occur when providers affiliated with one EMR or network of care suddenly, through an HIE, can access authoritative results on their patients from disparate facilities not previously automatically integrated into their EMR system,” said Priebe.
“Over time, we look forward to hopefully adding different testing results, like diagnostic imaging. As systems are evolved to support continuity-of-care standards, HIE could be a wonderful means of exchange,” he added.
David Gorelick, MD, an internal medicine specialist at Newport-based specialty group Aquidneck Medical Associates, agrees that HIE will be beneficial to providers who need to open up silos of information. “If a patient goes somewhere other than Aquidneck for care, the provider needs to access our information to see a full continuum of the patient’s care record,” said Gorelick.
“My computer system has medication lists, allergies, immunizations and problem lists that should be available to other providers when they see my patients,” he said.
Although the HIE will begin to automatically collect data from consenting patients this month, according to Christensen, clinicians might have to wait before accessing information, because a critical mass of data has to be aggregated within the system to be of value to providers. RIQI is working with the Rhode Island clinical community to determine when to let providers view clinical data, he said.
“Until there’s enough data in the system, the likelihood that a provider is going to find records of a patient when the patient walks in the door, and that the patient has data in the database, is very small ... but will grow over time,” explained Christensen. “So the variables of how many patients are enrolled in the program, how many data-sharing partners we have and how long they have been feeding data will come into play.”
Gorelick hopes that by 2012, RIQI will have enough data populated to have physicians viewing the system. “You have to sign patients up as well as get labs, imaging companies and pharmacies linked and tested to make sure the system works,” Gorelick said. Then clinicians can be trained and signed up.
“It’s a progression of steps that has to occur,” he said.