HIE Rundown – 6-08-21

Health 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.

Listen

From Healthcare de Jure, host Matt Fisher’s guest is Brendan Keeler, Product Manager for Zeus Health. Their discussion topics include the impact of patient record location and cross organizational movement of data; interoperability frameworks; opportunity and cost of new regulatory requirements; and evolution of digital health products and collaborative opportunities of platforms.

News and Noted

Aigilx Health and NextGate Partner to Support HIEs with Next Generation Identity Matching and Community-Wide Interoperability
NextGate (@NextGate), a global company in enterprise patient identification, and Aigilx Health, Inc. (@AigilxHealth), a company in healthcare interoperability and health information exchange (HIE) services, announced a strategic partnership to make migration simpler for community and health information exchanges with next generation identity matching and intelligent data collection for whole-person care.

CAQH and EHNAC Partner to Provide Incentives for FHIR App Developers to Become Accredited
CAQH (@CAQH) and EHNAC (@EHNAC) have partnered to provide incentives for application developers participating in the CAQH Endpoint Directory to become accredited through the Trusted Dynamic Registration and Authorization Accreditation Program (TDRAAP) from EHNAC and UDAP.org, publisher of the Unified Data Access Profiles. TDRAAP accreditation affirms an app’s technical and security credentials and gives health plans the confidence they need to connect and share member data.

KPI Ninja Whitepaper – Collaboration with Johns Hopkins
KPI Ninja (@kpininja) and Johns Hopkins collaborated on a whitepaper that details how HIEs can offer risk stratification and predictive analytics to support their participants’ population health data needs. KPI Ninja used the Johns Hopkins ACG System to provide integrated, advanced, comprehensive analytics for Health Information Exchanges and health care providers. Read the whitepaper.

New Joint Venture Poised to Transform Health Care and Improve Outcomes
Four health care organizations are partnering to create a new company focused on helping HIEs and their communities, payers and providers improve health outcomes. The newly formed partnership, known as BeyondHIE (@BeyondHie), will offer a comprehensive suite of services, technology and project management to support value-based care. BeyondHIE, a nonprofit organization, will support health care organizations by bringing together health data partners and enabling that data to be scaled and enhanced. The four companies joining together are Comagine Health, Idaho Health Data Exchange, Orion Health and the Utah Health Information Network. These industry leaders offer deep expertise in the areas of data quality, utilization, support and delivery. Together, they will provide services that support health care organizations on their journey to improve health care quality, while also assisting with funding of provider connectivity.

Vaya Health Selects VirtualHealth to Support its Care Management Program
VirtualHealth (@VirtualHealth_) announced that Vaya Health (Vaya) (@VayaHealth) has selected the HELIOS® platform to support care management for Medicaid members across the 22 North Carolina counties that Vaya serves. Vaya, a public managed care organization (MCO) offering behavioral health and intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD) services, chose the HELIOS platform after performing a comprehensive market analysis.

Events

DirectTrust – STARTS TOMORROW!

HL7

SHIEC

Now Hiring

HL7

CRISP is Hiring!
CRISP (@CRISPhealth) serves affiliate organization Connie, Connecticut’s state-designated Health Information Exchange (HIE), to positively impact the healthcare system through improved patient care and outcomes, reduced costs, and data-driven understanding of statewide public health concerns. They are currently hiring for the following positions: Sr. Account Manager, Program Assistant for Governance and Administration, and Account Manager. View job descriptions.

PATIENT ID NOW

Patient ID Now is a coalition of healthcare organizations representing a wide range of healthcare stakeholders committed to advancing through legislation and regulations a nationwide strategy to address patient identification. Read more about the coalition.

  • Patient Matching: An Essential Tool in the Era of COVID-19
    Free Recording

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of ensuring patients are accurately matched to their medical records, yet the problem of patient misidentification persists, endangering patient safety, and the public health response. Listen to the newly formed Patient ID Now Coalition during a virtual hill briefing with health leaders on July 7. They dive into the implications of patient matching and identification during the pandemic.

Patient ID Now Coalition Pleased Congress is Addressing Patient Misidentification
Patient ID Now, a coalition of leading healthcare organizations, including the American College of Surgeons, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), Intermountain Healthcare and Premier Healthcare Alliance, is pleased that the U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove the longstanding ban in its Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill that stifles innovation around patient identification.

The Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative

SHIEC (@SHIEClive) is the National Trade Association for Health Information Exchange Organizations. It is routine for important data about patients’ ongoing care to reside in multiple unconnected organizations. SHIEC member HIEs use information technology and trusted relationships in their service areas to enable secure, authorized exchange of patient information among disparate providers. By providing enhanced access to all available and relevant patient data SHIEC HIE members aim to improve the quality, coordination, and cost-effectiveness of health care provided in their communities. Read their news feed.

SHIEC Announces Selection of new Government Affairs Team
SHIEC announces the selection of Troutman Pepper Strategies and Alston & Bird for comprehensive government affairs representation. They are engaged with the Advocacy Committee and are already making great strides.

SHIEC Welcomes Three New State HIE Members
SHIEC announced that three new members have joined the organization, including the Connecticut Health Information Exchange (Connie), Big Sky Care Connect of Montana and Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC).

The Sequoia Project

The Sequoia Project (@SequoiaProject) was chartered to advance the implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange. The ONC transitioned management of its eHealth Exchange to The Sequoia Project for maintenance. Since 2012, the Exchange has grown to become the largest health information exchange network in the country.

The CommonWell

CommonWell Health Alliance (@CommonWell) is devoted to the simple vision that health data should be available to individuals and providers regardless of where care occurs. Additionally, provider access to this data must be built-in health IT at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the people they serve.

CommonWell Welcomes Newest Members and Service Adopters
April showers bring May flowers, or so the saying goes. For CommonWell, April brought them a fantastic group of new members, including new Service Adopters. These newest members continue to expand the CommonWell member diversity and leverage the new service offerings and use cases their Alliance is bringing to the market.

DirectTrust

A pioneer in offering technical trust and confidence in the secure exchange of health information, DirectTrust (@DirectTrustorg) is committed to collaboration for advancing secure communication. As a non-profit trade alliance, DirectTrust operates not only as a membership organization, but also as an ANSI-accredited standards body, a trust framework supported by policy, and an accreditor for reliable and trusted exchange across the DirectTrust network. Read their News and Events.

DirectTrust Reports Continued Solid Growth during the First Quarter
DirectTrust reported continued steady growth in the number of Direct exchange transactions, patient/consumer use, trusted addresses, and network users during the first quarter of 2021. DirectTrust is a non-profit healthcare industry alliance created to support secure, identity-verified electronic exchanges of protected health information (PHI) between provider organizations, and between providers and patients, for the purpose of improved coordination of care.

HL7

Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International (HL7) (@HL7) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7 is supported by more than 1,600 members from over 50 countries, including 500+ corporate members representing healthcare providers, government stakeholders, payers, pharmaceutical companies, vendors/suppliers, and consulting firms. Read their newsfeed.

Resources

Case Study: NEHII Rises to the Challenge of COVID-19 with Cloud-Based Analytics and Robust Patient Matching Tools
The Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NEHII) is a leading non-profit health information exchange (HIE) serving more than 4 million residents across 300 participating health care providers, payers and the State of Nebraska. NEHII partnered with NextGate to accurately match and connect critical public health information across the state of Nebraska to support trusted data exchange and case reporting for COVID-19 using an Enterprise Master Patient Index on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Download this eBook by NextGate (@NextGate) to read the case study.

Consensus: The Chase for Interoperability
In its continued campaign to bring about data interoperability across the healthcare industry by 2024, the HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) jointly released a set of new rules in 2019 to further promote the seamless exchange of protected health information (PHI). Despite increasing attempts to facilitate interoperability through regulations, the challenges lie elsewhere in creating seamless data exchange among a patient’s physician, hospital, labs, pharmacy, and others along the continuum of care.

Download this paper by eFax Corporate (@eFaxCorporate) to learn more about the fastest, most cost-effective way for your organization to access and share patient data through one interoperable platform.

eHealth Initiative Resource Center
Interoperability Files – Check out the new white paper resource in the eHealth Initiative’s (@eHealthDC) Resource Center: Case Study: Remote Patient Monitoring

ONC Interoperability Pledge
Companies that provide 90 percent of electronic health records used by hospitals nationwide as well as the top five largest health care systems in the country have agreed to implement three core commitments: Consumer Access, No Blocking/Ensuring Transparency, and Standards. The ONC (@ONC_HealthIT) wants vendors to sign a pledge. Is your vendor pledging? Find out who is on the list.