Leaders of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, in Newport Beach, California, announced Wednesday that the hospital has connected 250 providers to its health information exchange (HIE) five months after beginning rollout.
The implementation milestone marks the successful first phase of Hoag's substantial HIE initiative, dedicated to optimizing its community's healthcare experience, they said.
"Our health information exchange program is already creating tremendous value within our community," said Martin Fee, MD, chief medical information officer for Hoag. "The ability to share data securely and in real time provides our physicians with views of patient information that will ultimately lead to improved care at a lower cost."
Hoag credits HIE partner Medicity for developing rapidly deployable technology and an implementation methodology that enables non-technical Hoag personnel to connect community physicians to the HIE via the Novo Grid as a first step in the larger collaboration process.
"We are very excited about the efficiency of this exchange solution," said Catherine Chang, MD, an internal medicine physician on the Hoag medical staff who is now receiving results and reports electronically from Hoag. "Hoag helped us get started quickly, and the immediate results have been fantastic. Our staff particularly appreciates the process improvements that come from not relying on faxed results."
Hoag said its HIE currently distributes laboratory, radiology, pathology, transcribed reports and face sheets to both paper-based practices and those using electronic health records (EHRs). Community providers without EHRs can access and print patient information securely via a web-based application.
According to the hospital, the Hoag HIE has already integrated electronically with Allscripts and eClinicalWorks EHRs and will soon integrate with NextGen, with other ONC-certified EHRs to follow.
"Today's implementation milestone is just the beginning," said Tim Moore, senior vice president and chief information officer for Hoag. "Our goal is to connect 500 providers by October 2011, and we won't stop there. We will keep connecting physicians and integrating with EHRs. We will soon have comprehensive health records available to our community physicians. This HIE effort is part of our ongoing commitment to provide the highest quality services to our community."
