The Delaware Health Information Network is the first health information exchange in the U.S. to have all acute care hospitals in the state delivering medical results to its statewide network. “Reaching 100% acute care hospital participation in just six years is a tremendous achievement for the healthcare community and people of Delaware”, said DHIN Executive Director, Jan Lee MD.
Participation of all six acute care hospitals will become even more powerful later this year when DHIN launches an alert system that advises more than 2,400 practicing physicians in the state using DHIN. Providers and health plans will be notified when one of their patients has been discharged from the hospital or emergency department.
Dr. Lee presented an overall view of a very busy year in terms of developing new services at DHIN at AHRQ’s Innovation Exchange web event held June 5, 2013 titled “Building HIEs to Support ACOs and Medical Homes: Delaware’s Experience”.
She commented, “Meaningful Use is creating a demand for exchange services well beyond simple electronic results delivery. Because DHIN is already the trusted provider of information exchange in the state, we find that the providers and hospitals are looking to DHIN to provide solutions for Meaningful Use interoperability requirements.”
Also, several EHR vendors are now able to query and update the state immunization registry from within the user’s EHR. A pilot is being conducted with two hospitals to enable the end user to click on a link in the radiology report that they received through DHIN and then the viewer is taken to the actual image.
Dr. Lee explained how tools are being developed to enable the patient to receive updates of their chart in the “Community Health Record” on their mobile device, as well as using secure messaging with their provider. According to Dr. Lee, “We expect to become an exchange partner on eHealth Exchange just as soon as our vendor successfully completes confirmation testing of the technology. This will allow us to exchange data with federal partners such as the VA, DOD, and SSA, as well as with other HIEs.”
In addition, DHIN is working with Public Health to integrate the newborn screening registry into the Community Health Record and working on a link inside ProAccess to the Delaware Prescription Monitoring program. Testing is going on right now and will go live soon.
Several practices are pilot testing incorporating continuity of care documents into the Community Health Record. This will be the first opportunity to incorporate ambulatory practice-level data into the Community Health Record.
The state is exploring the potential to layer on analytic tools that will allow the data to be used for more than just point-of-care clinical decisions. Technology, privacy and security, consent, data use agreements, and legal issues all have to be taken into consideration.
Dr. Lee concluded by stressing, “State HIEs or other public HIEs whose members are business competitors need to develop the business model for the HIE. The HIE has to be viewed as a business with a revenue stream to support every service offered.”