A brief summary of the April interoperability working group meeting.

This is the format to use when submitting success stories for inclusion in the Online Interoperability Resource Center.

New models of medicine are driving transformation in healthcare. Value-based models and consumer expectations are changing the way we manage the health of a population. Payers are rethinking how to build strong relationships with in-network providers, and how to meet consumer expectations.

Joe O'Hara, director of clinical innovation at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, will discuss the organization's clinical integration approach to support providers in value-based models of care. Their goals:

•  Help more members find patient-centered care;

•  Improve STARS rating;

•  Reduce out-of-network spending; and

•  Continue migration from fee-for-service to fee-for-value.

Learn about Horizon's pathway to clinical integration.

Colleen O’Donnell, Policy and Practice Improvement Specialist for The National Council for Behavioral Health addresses the Interoperability workgroup today. She will be presenting on the SAMHSA-HRSA Center of Integrated Health Solutions. The program focuses on the integration of primary care and behavioral health services. Her presentation will focus on the challenges and solutions to privacy and consent issues that the program has identified to support data sharing among providers

Learn NEW findings in the current state of progress towards achieving data sharing and cross-system interoperability. Hear from experts from Mayo Clinic and GE Healthcare Digital on how payers and providers are using technology to achieve patient centered care, and working toward achieving data sharing and cross-system interoperability.

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.

Greater Houston Healthconnect is using the DICOM Grid Gateway connected to Healthconnect’s community health record (CHR). Healthconnect provides an image sharing service that enables providers to share medical images in a variety of ways, irrespective of their own PACS system or viewing capabilities. Authorized physicians and administrators can query and retrieve patient images and associated reports, launch studies in a clinical, zero-footprint install viewer, download studies to a local PACS, leveraging sharing functionality from one centralized location. Physicians can also send images via a secure link to any provider in any location.

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.