Important news from HSX from the second quarter of 2018:
HIE Updates —
Building Bridges: HealthShare Exchange Extends to New Jersey
The river is no longer a barrier to health information exchange. On July 12, HealthShare Exchange (HSX) became part of the health-data-sharing landscape of the State of New Jersey, with its participation in the advisory committee meeting of NJHIN (the New Jersey Health Information Network), held by NJII (the New Jersey Innovation Institute), the organization that manages health information exchange for the state. HSX has been providing patient data services for some time to participating New Jersey medical facilities.
HSX’s New Jersey office address:
HealthShare Exchange
Cherry Hill Plaza
1415 Marlton Pike East, Suite 205, Cherry Hill, NJ.
Keeping Public Health Clinics Up to Date on Patient Health Status
In May, two Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) became the first such centers to tap into HSX’s Clinical Data Repository (CDR) for longitudinal patient information. Delaware Valley Community Health (DVCH) and Community Health & Dental Care (CHDC) (both members of the Health Federation of Philadelphia) now query the repository for information on their patients. As with HSX’s other FQHC members, these centers also take advantage of HSX’s Encounter Notification Service, which alerts the centers when one of their patients has an emergency or inpatient encounter at an area medical facility, and the Direct Messaging service, which establishes secure email-based communication between providers. Providers at these centers now access the HSX-delivered information within the workflow of their EHR. When they conclude a visit with a patient, their NextGen EHR also submits a summary of the encounter back to HSX to update the patient’s longitudinal record. These and other FQHCs, in the process of gaining access to HSX’s CDR, received grant support through Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services to offset technical implementation costs. Learn more.
New Broadcast: How HSX Benefits Philly
In June, Marty Lupinetti, President of HealthShare Exchange, (left) and HSX board member Rich Snyder, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Independence Blue Cross (right) recorded a show with Matt Cabrey, Executive Director of Select Greater Philadelphiaand Senior Vice President of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. They discussed the value of HSX to Philadelphia and its healthcare organizations and consumers. Look for the broadcast and podcast download later this summer on 1210 WPHT. Learn more.
Broader Care Coordination and Connectivity in Home Care
In April, a HealthShare Exchange team kicked off the new Innovation Speaker Series at Bayada Home Health Care. HSX presented on the value of health information exchange for home health providers. Yolande Greene, Senior Project Manager for Population Health at HSX, and Nathan Hecker, HSX’s Technical Operations Lead, launched the series that BAYADA has designed to turn even greater attention to care coordination and population health management. The HSX staff members outlined the assets that access to HSX patient data brings:
- historical data extraction
- HSX-generated reports and custom reports
- participant-subscribed reports
- dashboards (live data)
- and real-time data access for public health/population health purposes.
HIE Grant Monies Flow
A big thank you to the Pennsylvania Deptartment of Human Services, which in June announced CMS grants to connect hospitals, nursing homes, and ambulatory practices to health information exchange and the Pennsylvania Patient & Provider Network, (P3N).
Patient Tracking in Case of Emergency
Data security is paramount to HSX but so is contributing to community safety and crisis response. Philly’s expansive Fourth of July Welcome America celebration was occasion to once again place HSX’s UPAL service on standby. (Just in case.) UPAL provides medical centers with a centralized contact source that allows family members to locate loved ones within the regional healthcare system in the event of an emergency. Thankfully, no needs arose to activate UPAL.
New Version Brings Greater Access within ENS
Earlier this year, HSX piloted its new ENShare 3.1tool to a number of its member organizations that use its Encounter Notification Service (ENS). In ENShare 3,1:
Users can add care notes to each individual patient notification, and these notes are visible across ENShare users working within the same organization.- The interface gives access to a list of other HSX member organizations that subscribe to a particular patient.
- Designated users can manually enter admissions and discharges for receipt by HSX –– particularly useful to post-acute care organizations that want to be notified about patient activity post-discharge .
HSX plans to have all ENShare users transition to use ENShare 3.1 in August of this year.
Regional Health-Data Sharing Extends to Food & Nutrition
HSX and MANNA (the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance) have struck a partnership that allows the well-known food alliance to use health information exchange to better target nutritional services for those in need, due to their illnesses. Receiving important medical updates from HSX on its clients permits MANNA to better serve the needs of these individuals. MANNA now knows when its clients have had a healthcare event involving an encounter with a medical center, and is able to adjust services to those persons accordingly. The alliance is also able to query additional detail on the health status of their clients by accessing HSX’s Clinical Data Repository. MANNA, with its food-as-medicine mantra, has received special media attention recently for the cost savings and health benefits of its collaboration with another HSX member –– Health Partners Plans (HPP), a regional Medicaid/Medicare insurance-benefit manager. MANNA will eventually provide data back to HSX, including nutritional updates that can become part of the patient’s medical record, making HSX’s regional data repository even more valuable to providers, insurers, and other healthcare organizations. Learn more.
The Champs Roll On, Spreading HIE
Annually, HealthShare Exchange bestows its Health Information Exchange (HIE) Champions Awards upon HSX participants who are helping to make health information exchange a core tool in healthcare and a widely implemented reality in its service region. The award’s most recent recipients –– presented with the recognitions late last year –– now grace the HIE Champs Wall at HSX’s Center City Philadelphia offices. Become an HIE Champion and learn more.
Population Health updates —
HSX is underway with its Population Health Program, serving the HSX Community! Highlights:
Reporting and Analytics
- Einstein Healthcare Network became the first member to take advantage of the program’s reporting capabilities with a request for a readmissions report to help identify and track the rate of readmissions for its patients.
- HSX is working with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to track opioid encounters for Philadelphia residents, to identify hotspots and apply targeted interventions.
- HSX launched a beta pilot of its Population Health Management Portal, to run until mid- August.
- Hospitals are preparing to conduct their Community Health Needs Assessment for next year and HSX is developing a service to support this effort.
Quality Reporting
- In May, HSX worked with Penn Medicine to implement the electronic submission of clinical quality measures to the Public Health Gateway.
- With its vendor partner Onpoint, HSX is aggregating data and processing measures for the CPC+ Program. The target go-live for this initiative is October 2018.
Interested in HSX population health services? Please contact Pam Clarke at pam.clarke@healthshareexchange.org
or Yolande Greene at yolande.greene@healthshareexchange.org
Innovation Updates —
Inconjunction with June’s Philly Health IT Summit, held by Healthcare Informatics, the MarketStreet initiative of HSX’s new Innovation, Research, and Developlment arm conducted its Consumer Health-Data-Exchange Hackathon. Congratulations to the GeneIntel team (runner-up) and to the winning Digital Innovation & Consumer Experience (DICE) team from Jefferson Health. Read all about it & see the pictures.
A cruise on the Delaware River! In June, HSX held an employee outing and meeting to review HSX’s new and updated business plan (BP 3.0), which includes a growing flow of bi-directional data across the river (expanded health information exchange between Pennsylvania and New Jersey).
Don’t miss it:
The 11th Annual Regional HIMSS DV-NJ Chapters Conference (the yearly fall conference of the Delaware Valley and New Jersey chapters of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society) on September 26th – 28th, 2018, at Harrah’s Resort Hotel and Casino, Atlantic City, NJ.