Staff, current and former board members, current and former committee chairs, workgroup chairs, and HIE champions gathered to mark this milestone: five years of health information exchange in the Delaware Valley!
Attendees toured the HSX offices and command center, and speakers highlighted the before, now, and future of health information interoperability in our region:
- Marty Lupinetti, executive director of HSX, lauded the fast-growth trajectory of HSX, citing the upward arc of participation and data exchange. He discussed coming areas of expansion for HSX in support of performance-based reimbursement, patient engagement and experience, innovation built on a regional clinical data repository, and geographical expansion for HSX.
- Kate Flynn, president of Health Care Improvement Foundation and one of the “original four” HSX thought leaders, a founding HSX board member, first HSX treasurer and chair of the HSX Finance Committee, and a named “HIE Champion” for HSX in 2013, discussed the genesis of the exchange and the impressive degree to which it is achieving its mission and vision.
- Joe Miller, director of eHealth strategy and innovation at HSX health-plan member Amerihealth Caritas, reviewed the rapid fruition of early discussions of the need for health information exchange in the region. Architect of HSX’s first service use cases and an early member of the HSX technology committee, Miller summarized the importance of the involvement of each person who has contributed to HSX’s groundbreaking, pioneering successes.
Bringing attendees a frontline clinical view of the use of health information exchange, Temple Health care coordinators Beth Joniec, RN, MSN, and Ashley Gasperi, RN, MSN, discussed their use of HSX services and the value the data is providing to them and their patients, citing individual case examples. (See their remarks below.)
Marty Lupinetti capped off the festivities with a toast to the amazing pace of the community effort required to establish HSX as a growing asset in the greater Philadelphia area’s healthcare and innovation environment.
Thank you to HSX’s vendor partners for their generous sponsorship of this fifth-anniversary event:
Nurse navigator remarks at the event:
“Hello, my name is Beth Joniec and this is Ashley Gasperi, we are part of Temple Health’s Care Transition team. We are a team of nurse navigators, community health workers, social work and pharmacy. As a nurse navigator for the team we are aligned with TPI, Temple Physicians Inc., primary care practices. Our focus is to do telephonic outreach when our patients are discharged from the hospital. We receive a daily feed from HealthShare Exchange letting us know when our patients are discharged from participating facilities.
“Our outreach call consists of screening for clinical and or social barriers that place a patient at risk for readmission or non-adherence to their plan of care. Through this effort, and with the assistance of HSX’s Encounter Notification Service, we have been able to identify and assist many patients that are at risk. Some of the barriers that we have identified and helped to eliminate are:
- transportation
- food insecurity
- lack of insurance
- home care and in-home support needed
- durable medical equipment needed
- medications not ordered or covered
- lack of knowledge related to disease management.
One particular patient that stands out to me is a woman who was in Abington Memorial Hospital for diverticulitis. During the admission, a lung mass was found that needed to be worked up. We learned of this through the HSX notification service, and when I called she was unable to obtain her medications because she had no money. She was a waitress and was considering going into work to get tip money so she could obtain her meds. She was very overwhelmed with still not feeling well and needed help arranging an oncology appointment for a lung biopsy. She also did not drive and needed transportation to her appointments. Due to her financial situation, she was not seeing her PCP regularly or filling her prescriptions for her hypertension and COPD meds. I was able to have a community health worker and a social worker make a house visit and assist her with an application for medical assistance, which made her medication co-pays affordable and provided her with a transportation benefit so she could get to and from her appointments. I was able to make a connection to Fox Chase Cancer Center and had her set up with medical oncology.”
“Hello, I’m Ashley Gasperi, and I would like to share another example of how the HSX data has helped –– on this case with a patient that was discharged home from a nursing facility after a lengthy stay at the hospital. We would not have known he was discharged home, as he did not have a working phone to call the office to set up follow-up or for homecare to contact him to set up in-home services. He was on Coumadin and needed urgent PT/INR checks and follow up with his family doctor. He also had no food in the home and no family or support. We were able to send a community health worker to the home and establish contact. We were able to address his medical needs as well as his social needs. A neighbor was financially abusing him for his check each month. Protective services were involved and they took over his finances as well as provided a case worker and someone to help him at home with cooking and cleaning due to his multiple medical issues.
The outcome of these cases could have been very different were we not participating in the health information exchange now taking place in the Delaware Valley. HSX has become an indispensable tool for us in care coordination.”