HIE Rundown – 9-29-20

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Posted By: Roberta Mullin September 29, 2020

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

NOW PLAYING – Tune in at 8:30 am, 4:30 pm and 12:30 am ET

Tune in to Harlow on Healthcare this week, as Micky Tripathi, Chief Alliance Officer at Arcadia and a long time leader on the Health IT scene speaks with David Harlow about information blocking, FHIR APIs, and whether federal rules go far enough to ensure availability and usability of health data.

NOW PLAYING – Tune in at 7:00 am, 3:00 pm and 11:00 pm ET

Also tune in this week to Healthcare APPtitude: The CIO Series. In this episode, MobileSmith Health’s CTO Greg Jones and his team take a deep dive into understanding the ins and outs of FHIR, and how it has sparked healthcare’s renewed commitment to interoperability for app developers.

News and Noted

Health System Survey Shows Lack of Ownership Over Provider Data as It Highlights its Importance
The Health Care business of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions (@LexisNexisRisk) has announced the results of a survey designed to identify provider data governance decision-makers in provider organizations and understand data governance challenges and their impact on operational efficiency. The survey shows that while provider data integrity is vital for efficient care coordination, the lack of a designated department responsible for this information serves as a barrier to its effective use.

DataLink’s Evoke360 Automates Data Extraction from Electronic Health Records to Continuity of Care Document files, Closes Care Gaps and Improves Payer and Provider Connectivity
DataLink Software (DataLink), a solution to enhance interoperability, reduce costs, improve quality scores and ensure risk adjustment accuracy, highlights the innovative capabilities of its one-source, payer-agnostic platform in the Evoke360 population health solution, enabling providers to rapidly access, extract and electronically export patient data from a meaningful use-certified electronic health record (EHR) to a continuity of care (CCD) document. This innovative solution enhances provider workflows and clinical decision-making, virtually eliminating human transmission errors from faxing and uploading documentation for supplemental data and closing quality care gaps in near real time. For payers, greater accuracy and a dramatic reduction in data extraction time rapidly closes gaps in care improving patient outcomes, positively impacting HEDIS® scores and CMS STAR ratings.

To Read

The Path Forward: A Better Normal – By Anish Mahajan, MD, MS, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and LANES (@LANES_HIE) Chair of the Board – We’re all well aware of the unprecedented historical significance of the global public health situation managing the coronavirus pandemic. Approximately 21.2 million cases are confirmed globally, and of those, 5.4 million cases are present in the United States at the time of this writing, with many states reaching new seven-day rolling average highs for newly reported cases. We’ve all had to shift our behaviors in how we do things – including changing the way we live and work.

LANES HIE Integrates Master Patient Index Technology with CURES PDMP – By Leo Pak, Chief Technology Officer, LANES (@LANES_HIE) – With the national opioid crisis worsening during the pandemic, LANES participants who are licensed prescribers and pharmacists can be confident of querying the right individual with the right medical record’s prescribed narcotics history through its CURES connectivity. Not only does connectivity to California’s CURES Prescription Drug Database (PDMP) eliminate an extra step in provider workflow to retrieve important patient information, prescribers can trust that patients are accurately linked and matched through its cloud-based solution.

Events

Organizations

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.

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.

As Compliance Deadline Nears, The Sequoia Project Announces Anti-Information Blocking Support for Healthcare and Health IT Communities
The Sequoia Project, a non-profit dedicated to solving health IT interoperability for the public good, launched new resources and training for the healthcare and health IT communities preparing for the November 2, 2020 deadline to comply with U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) information blocking and interoperability rules. The program includes a 13-week Information Blocking Compliance Boot Camp and a free public resource center.

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.

Slow COVID-19: CommonWell Member Resources & Initiatives
Since inception, CommonWell members have been innovators and game changers in the health IT space. Today is no different. In this time of uncertainty and stress to both our health system and our personal wellbeing, it is not surprising that their members once again are stepping up to the challenge to solve some of our world’s biggest challenges. Through their website, they will continue to share and update what their members are doing in the fight to slow COVID-19, provide necessary care coordination resources, and ultimately, help save lives.

Resources

Why Patient Identity Management Tools are Critical for COVID-19 Care and Disease Surveillance
Is your organization struggling to achieve an integrated data environment amid COVID-19? Does fragmented patient information slow down your response efforts? Effective case management and reporting requires ongoing support and creative solutions for healthcare’s most fundamental problems—including oft-overlooked patient identity matching and health information exchange.

Download this eBook by NextGate to learn how to:

  • Bridge the infrastructure gaps that impact COVID-19 responses
  • Overcome demographic data challenges needed create a longitudinal

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 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: FHIR FAQs

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.