Nick Bonvino, CEO of the Greater Houston HealthConnect addresses the Business and Clinical Motivators workgroup on their efforts in Texas. GHH came online in 2012 and achieved sustainability in 2015 working to encourage the furthering of the Triple Aim. Aside from connecting health systems and hospitals, GHH also supports the county jail system, a unique set of challenges. Mr. Bonvino also elaborated on their highly successful ETHAN ambulance connectivity platform integrating EMS run sheets into EMRs.

What are the regulatory drivers of health information technology and consumers that impacts clinical and business changes in your organization? Join the next Business and Clinical Motivators meeting to hear Mark Savage, Director of Health Information Technology Policy and Programs from the National Partnership for Women and Families. Mark will present the findings from the Partnership’s survey – Engaging Patients and Families: How Consumers Value and Use Health IT. This work helps to highlight what patients want from providers and the vendors that serve them. Regulations promoting Patient Engagement has been very successful, what's next? Mark provides insight into what the national partnership for patient and families, and the consumer partnership for eHealth hope to see in future regulatory efforts.

Quality Health Network (QHN), Grand Junction, Colorado works with the local VA hospital to provide VA clinicians with access to the QHN longitudinal patient record. VA providers are able to log into the QHN patient data repository to view information on care provided to Veterans in the community. In the rural area supported by QHN community providers serve many Veterans. Access to the patient record enables VA providers to have a complete picture of the veteran’s care. VA providers have made over 17,000 queries in the eight months since the VA began access the QHN portal.

The Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NeHII) has begun implementation of tools that enable providers to seamlessly access patient data in the NeHII repository from within their EHR. This single sign-on function captures user access credentials and the context of the patient record whose record the user is accessing within the EHR. This minimizes the workflow disruption for providers to access NeHII records. In the first month of implementation, 741 users adopted single sign-on and accessed almost 6,000 patient records.

Healthshare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania (HSX) has implemented an automated care team finder that allows a hospital to find the patient’s primary care doctor using a directory of Direct addresses. The automated care team finder uses the patient’s member identification with his or her healthcare insurer to identify providers involved in the patient’s recent medical care. The identified providers receive C-CDA documents with emergency department and inpatient discharge summaries using Direct Secure Messaging. HSX has sent over 70,000 discharge summaries using this method with 51 percent of these documents sent to providers across health systems.

Pediatric Partners has adopted provider-centered exchange between their practice and Rady Children's Hospital. The integration allows users in both systems to pull the clinical information and provider notes directly into their local EMR. Both the hospital and Pediatric Partners have the ability to query each other’s systems to retrieve CCDAs. Both systems are able to integrate the CCDAs into their internal EHRs supported by different vendors.

HEALTHeLINK, in cooperation with Researchers at the Brookings Institution, conducted a pilot study to examine the impact of the use of health information exchange (HIE) technology on reducing laboratory tests and radiology examinations in emergency departments (EDs) at three area hospitals. The results of the pilot show a significant reduction in the duplication of tests.