HIE Rundown 3-10-17

network-200Health Information Exchange (HIE) is happening every minute of every day. Your personal health information is moving and being viewed to improve the quality of your healthcare and lower the costs. The job will not be complete until all health records are digital and interoperable. Here’s what’s happening to make that reality.

University of Wisconsin Puts FHIR to Work
A research project led by Dr. Richard Bruce of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (@UWMadison) is now underway to use the latest iteration of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standard to improve radiology workflow and care quality. Working with their vendor partner, McKesson Imaging & Workflow Solutions (@McKesson), the university has deployed a prototype FHIR interface module which connects Conserus Imaging Fellow™, a McKesson vendor-agonistic workflow solution, to the university’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. Read press release.

Surescripts Advances Interoperability with Aprima Medical Software, eClinicalWorks and NextGen Healthcare
Surescripts (@Surescripts), the nation’s leading health information network, continues to expand nationwide interoperability via its National Record Locator Service (NRLS) with electronic health records (EHR) software vendors Aprima Medical Software, eClinicalWorks and NextGen Healthcare. With NRLS, Aprima, eClinicalWorks and NextGen Healthcare can provide care teams with more complete patient medical histories and decrease the burden on administrative staff who currently respond to records requests manually.

drchrono and Physitrack Partner for Patient Engagement Initiative
drchrono, Inc. (@drchrono), the industry leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform on the web, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch, serving over 100,000 clinicians in the United States, announced the integration of Physitrack’s unique patient engagement toolkit inside its practice management platform. This integration will make Physitrack’s telemedicine solution easily available to drchrono’s providers, giving them the ability to offer high quality care and follow up programs for their patients.

athenahealth’s Health Plan Data Exchange Service Enables Data Exchange Between Providers and Health Plans
athenahealth, Inc. (@athenahealth), a provider of network-enabled services and point-of-care mobile applications for hospital and ambulatory clients nationwide, announced a new health plan data exchange service which extends the company’s ability to drive performance for providers and for health plans. With the new service, athenahealth providers who exchange clinical data with payers for quality management, risk adjustment, and performance management programs will now be able to do so electronically, via a direct connection to participating health plans and their technology partners.

Raintree Systems Partners with Kno2 to Deliver a Fully Integrated Document Interoperability Platform Leveraging Direct Messaging, Document Query and Cloud Fax
Kno2™ (@Kno2), the company that optimizes patient document exchange for everyone in healthcare, announced that Raintree Systems (@RaintreeSystems), a provider of highly configurable, comprehensive electronic health records (EHR)/electronic medical records (EMR) and practice management software and services solutions, is adding Kno2’s interoperability platform to its Raintree software.

eHealth Technologies and HealtheConnections Enhance Exchange of Images; Improve Provider Efficiency and Patient Care
eHealth Technologies (@eHealthTec), a provider of image-enabled Health Information Exchange (HIE) solutions, and HealtheConnections, a Syracuse-based regional health information organization (RHIO) supporting HIE for the 11 counties of central and northern New York have teamed up to share medical images across the care provider community in a way never before possible.

Black Book Survey Finds Top Rated Hospital EHR Vendors are also 2017’s FHIR and Interoperability Champions
As nearly every US hospital has an electronic health record system, 41% of surveyed medical record administrators still report struggling with exchanging patient health records with other healthcare providers, particularly physicians not on the same EHR platform. 25% say they are still unable to use any patient information received electronically from external sources. Read more.