Home Forums Discussions Meaningful Use Health Information Exchanges (HIE): What's Up?

Our local hospital sponsored an information session this morning about the new Health Information Exchanges. They got a grant to help local docs get set up with HIE. Looking on the AC website I see that they have two interfaces set up with HIEs in NY state. Has anyone had any experience with this?

We are connected in NYS. We can go in and get labs and X-rays from just about any facility in the region. For us it is very slow but when we need the info during a visit it is probably our best source. We only needed to get signed consents from our patients. At this point it is just one way. Downloading to us.

There is one for NYU. We are associated with the Mount Sinai/Contiuum Health Partners system, and they are developing their own HIE.

We are connected to the NYU HIE on a pro forma basis, we have not, as yet attempted to retrieve data. We do get notices of consult notes having been generated.
Connectivity to the HIE was part of our requirement to participate in NYU's University Physicians Network

I have a hard time envisioning this working in a way that really helps patient care. I have this sense that it's just a way for the government and insurance companies to get their hands on more patient data.

agree. but some utility exists especially to docs who admit to HIE's institution

It would not be helpful for us to sign up with the HIEs in NY since we aren't associated with those hospitals. But we are associated with a group of 5 or so hospitals that are developing their own HIE (please do not ask ME why they have to make a different one.) Alice has privilages at 2 of the hospitals, we refer to specialists at another of them which is a specialty hospital, and most of the other specialists which we refer to are at these hospitals. So if we can use it (when it is done) it might be useful for us and our patients.

Maryland has an HIE system that has proven useful to us. Most of the hospitals and some of the imaging centers and labs are connected.
If one of our patients has been to the ER or admitted to a hospital different from our own, we can access discharge summaries, admit notes, and sometimes med lists and imaging results.
This is also useful when seeing new patients who have been referred to us, when we want to gather these types of information.

Thanks Jon. Glad to hear that HIE has been helpful. So can you actually go in and pull the data from other institutions? That would be handy.

This was the idea of the HIE. But of course, we all suspected that the idea would be kicked aside and replaced with just submitting anything about your care of patients to the government and insurance companies. Well, I was afraid of it anyway, but I did keep my hopes up.

Glad to see that my hopes may not be thrashed.

Just to be clear... when we signed up with the HIE, it was suggested that our enrollment include providing the organization with a database of our patients. There was also the potential to upload some of our own EMR data to be "shared in a clinically useful manner". We could select from a list of events for the HIE to "push" information to us (for example, if one of our patients was admitted, we would then receive notification and admission notes, etc).
We elected not to do any of those things. In other words, we have access to some clinical information that we need, but we do not provide any data about our own patients.

Jon
to restate the obvious, the debate between the institutions who want to "share" our data, and the Docs who want to protect patient information, rages on.
AC's default agreement with NYU's HIE prevents sharing w/o express consent on a patient by patient basis. I personally am very wary of any institution wanting access to patient data.