The region’s health information exchange, HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania (HSX) — a nonprofit formed by the area’s health systems and insurers — has reached exciting developmental milestones in mid-2014 that are allowing healthcare providers and payers of greater Philadelphia to share information on care of individual patients.
Healthcare provider members are exchanging information not just within their hospital/health systems but between them, using the exchange. Such inter-system sharing of patient data via HSX started with the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Crozer-Keystone Health System, and now includes a half-dozen health systems and 20 hospitals.
“We are glad to be scaling the exchange up to continue to cover Philadelphia and beyond,” says Daniel Wilt, HSX’s Senior Director of Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer. “We want to get clinical data sharing as fully into use with our members as we can, as soon as possible.”
As of this month, more than 4,500 physicians are able to use the exchange to send and receive information across the region. HSX has also enabled member hospitals to transfer patient discharge information to primary care physicians. Monthly message volume on the HSX system increased more than 25-fold between June 2014 and September 2014.
“I’ve been thankful to be able to take advantage of discharge information facilitated by HSX, which gathers all of the hospital results, including tests, and sends it straight into our inbox in our electronic health record system,” says John S. Potts, DO, a primary care physician with Clinical Care Associates of the University of Pennsylvania, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “I like to review this information as soon as I receive it, and then include it in the patient’s chart for easy access. We can’t wait for days or weeks for this kind of information, as we used to in the past, because it helps us right away to adjust the patient’s transitional and follow-up care. I see us using this a lot more in the future.”
Contact: Russ Allen 215 990-9628
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HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Inc. (HSX) is the health information organization that is planning, developing, implementing, and operating the regional health information exchange (HIE) for the five-county region of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Incorporated as a nonprofit organization, HSX was formed as a collaboration among major healthcare stakeholders, including health plans and acute-care hospitals across Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties to enable the electronic exchange of patient information to improve patient outcomes and to manage and lower healthcare costs.
For more information, visit http://www.hsxsepa.org.