PCDH Launch Lays Foundation for HIEs to Support Better Patient Care by Making It Possible to Deliver Patient Medical Record Alerts Across the Country
The Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) (@SHIEClive), a collaborative representing health information exchanges (HIEs), announced the national launch of the Patient Centered Data Home™ (PCDH) initiative, a nationwide initiative coordinated by SHIEC’s HIE members, including the Indiana Health Information Exchange (@IndianaHIE). This launch signals that HIEs throughout the country are now actively sharing data with each other to support mobile patient populations.
The Indiana Health Information Exchange participated in the Heartland implementation, one of three smaller production implementations created within geographical regions to prove the concept of inter-HIE information sharing and alerting. The Heartland region consists of seven HIEs across five states: East Tennessee Health Information Network (Knoxville, TN), Great Lakes Health Connect (Grand Rapids, MI), Indiana Health Information Exchange (Indianapolis, IN), HealthLINC (Bloomington, IN), Kentucky Health Information Exchange (Frankfort, KY), Michiana Health Information Network (South Bend, IN), and The Health Collaborative (Cincinnati, OH). Based on their success of the regional implementations, the participating HIEs have each agreed to a common, national agreement for participating in PCDH, which set the stage for connecting the implementations and rolling out the full-scale, national implementation.
“This is a significant step toward national interoperability,” said John Kansky, President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange. “Almost every single state has several healthcare markets that cross inter-state, inter-HIE lines; for example, northwest Indiana is suburban Chicago. PCDH now allows us to exchange data between HIEs for those markets, providing a huge benefit to our patients.”
What is PCDH?
At its core, PCDH is an inter-HIE notification and data sharing system that allows a patient’s records to follow them wherever they seek care. Because patients are unrestricted by geographic boundaries when they seek care, it is common for a person to be treated by a doctor, clinic or hospital a distance from where they live. Frequently the “away” treatment facility is not a part of the same HIE in which the patient’s “home” doctors participate. As a result, there is a higher risk that the clinician treating them will not have access to the patient’s full medical records to support diagnoses and treatment plans.
To more quickly alert the treating physician that there are medical records available for access from the patient’s doctors at home, and to provide a specific query location to retrieve those records, HIEs worked together to create the technical ability for HIEs to automatically notify each other regarding the existence of a patient’s medical records and to synchronize the patient’s identity among the HIE systems.
The mechanism that makes this work is very straightforward. When a patient presents at a medical facility away from home, that facility will generate an Admission, Discharge, Transfer (ADT) message. This message includes demographics about the patient; information such as the patient’s name, the patient’s location in the hospital, his or her address, phone number, gender, etc. By including ZIP Code information in the ADT, PCDH can automatically detect when a patient is being treated within a ZIP code outside of their normal home area.
When these events occur, the “away” HIE alerts the HIE in the patient’s home area, and that home HIE, known as the patient’s “data home,” automatically lets the treating HIE know they have records for the patient so the treating HIE can generate a query to access those records. Once the treatment encounter concludes, PCDH also makes it possible for the “away” HIE to alert the patient’s home HIE that there are new records for their patient that the home HIE providers can access in order to better care for the patient on an ongoing basis. This new capability makes it possible for a patient’s comprehensive medical history to follow them wherever they seek treatment.
About Indiana Health Information Exchange
The Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) was founded in 2004 as a health information exchange that enables hospitals, physicians, laboratories, pharmacies, payers, and other health service providers to avoid redundancy and deliver faster, more efficient, higher quality healthcare to patients in Indiana.
Today, by making information available to nearly 50,000 healthcare providers in Indiana and neighboring states, we deliver services that make a real difference in health and healthcare.
About SHIEC
SHIEC is the national collaborative of health information exchanges (HIEs) and strategic business and technology partners. As the unbiased data trustees in their communities, the 60 member HIE organizations manage and provide for the secure digital exchange of data by medical, behavioral, and social service providers to improve the health of the communities they serve. Collectively, SHIEC members serve almost 75 percent of the U.S. population.