The Delaware Valley and New Jersey Health Information Management and Systems Society (DV/NJHIMSS) carried the theme “Empowering the New Healthcare Era” into their regional meeting, where took the floor at the interoperability showcase to demonstrate live examples of the HSX admission and discharge services. Nearby healthcare providers have already begun taking advantage of this system previewed at the A.C. event.
Attendees saw a demonstration of health information exchange between two of the Philadelphia area’s health systems, using a design that will improve everyone’s care in the 21st century. The demo began with HSX member Main Line Health (MLH) illustrating an emergency department admission of a new patient followed by electronic request and receipt of the patient’s recent clinical history and name of primary care provider from the patient’s health plan.
Independence Blue Cross explained the use of the patient’s member identification to pull recent claims records and translate them that into a document showing the patient’s past clinical activity. The presentation demonstrated how the health plan would then transmit this clinical information back to the admitting/requesting hospital in the Main Line system, which uses this history to take better care of the patient, finally creating a summary of care for the hospital visit.
The HSX team then explained the routing of this MLH discharge summary to the patient’s primary doctor, in this case affiliated with Crozer-Keystone Health Plan. The patient’s doctor and her office staff received the MLH message into their office system and discussed the use of the discharge document in contacting the patient for follow-up care needed after the hospital visit. Through this system, doctors know about patients’ admissions, diagnosis, treatment, and needed transitional care.
HSX and its partners are demonstrating a better healthcare future for us all.