The HIE referred to as “healtheConnect Alaska” www.ak-ehealth.org formerly Alaska ehealth Network, is a nonprofit corporation, providing health information exchange and direct secure messaging services to more than 20 hospitals and 450 healthcare organizations across the state of Alaska.
The HIE healtheConnect Alaska is presenting new initiatives, developing new strategic technology partnerships, and renewing a commitment to link the state’s healthcare providers to a network.
“We are essentially doing a re-start of the organization,” said Laura Young Executive Director of healtheConnect Alaska, “We felt a rebrand would be important to signify that we are new and improved. Our staff is all new, we are restructuring how the board works, and we are changing and expanding our technology.”
The HIE will be adding tools to use to deal with patient encounters, to use with the PDMP and medication fill data, provide radiology images, increase the continuity of care documents, provide event notifications, and work with light analytics. Also, the HIE will also link behavioral health providers to the network, to include the Alaska Psychiatric Institute.
Core HIE services are provided such as the use of a Master Patient Index, providing user identity management, linking all hospital and provider EMR workflows, along with patient contact information. Single sign-on will also make it faster and easier for providers to access all the information available through the exchange. Now patient engagement apps are going to be part of the exchange.
The network will transition from a clinical data repository model (stored data in a central location) to become a federated gateway providing access to data in national networks, including eHealth Exchange, Carequality, and Common Well without downloading or storing the data.
The plan is to partner with a wide range of technology providers to enable the HIE to have greater flexibility than working with just one vendor. So healtheConnect Alaska will be using:
- NextGate for patient identify management
- Nextgen/Mirth’s interface engine
- Ambra for radiology image exchange
- TigerConnect for secure texting services
- DrFirst for medication fill history and access to PDMP data,
- Inpriva as their direct secure messaging solution provider
- Audacious Inquiry for a range of modifiable, open source, and cloud technology tools
Currently, Young and her team are working on other initiatives:
- The state of Alaska now allows HIE access to the PDMP but there are plans to link to PDMPs in Oregon and Washington
- Connect with the Department of Defense and Veteran’s Administration via eHealth Exchange for further rich data stores
- The HIE is working on a HIE sustainability and outreach plan, new web site, and working to provide more robust provider services