Unified Exchange Of Health Information Becomes A Reality For Upstate NY

By Karla Paris

A merger between Southern Tier Healthlink and Taconic Health Information Network and Community uses HIE and clinical BI application to manage, coordinate, share, and analyze patient data.

By Karla Paris, contributing writer

Southern Tier HealthLink (STHL) announced it is implementing Infor's cloud-based Cloverleaf Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE), a secure, standards-based infrastructure that integrates clinical data from disparate systems and manages clinical records and document types.

Infor Cloverleaf Hosted HIE allows STHL to forego software and hardware licenses, which reduces the need for large capital expenditures and saves resources. It will also have access to a secure clinical data repository, source system connectivity, a customizable clinical portal, MPI records, and public HIE connections. STHL is expected to maintain its systems investment because this vendor-neutral solution has the ability to exchange clinical data with any system that uses the Infor Cloverleaf Integration solution.

STHL is leveraging Infor Business Intelligence (BI) to support the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program, which promotes community-level collaborations and focuses on system reform, specifically a goal to achieve a 25 percent reduction in avoidable hospital use over five years.

The Infor Solution includes Motion and BI Dashboards; BI OLAP Server; BI Application Studio; BI Office Plus; Business Analytics; BI Planning; BI Consolidation; BI DeltaMiner; and Infor BI ImportMaster. The combination of these technologies serve as a backbone for a new collaborative effort between STHL and the Taconic Health Information Network and Community (THINC) called HealthlinkNY. HealthlinkNY is expected to serve an 11-county region spanning the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Southern Tier of New York.

As a Qualified Health IT Entity (QE), HealthlinkNY will maintain patients’ electronic health records from participating healthcare organizations and provider practices across the expansive geographical region, consolidating them into more centralized and consolidated records. Access to these records through HealthlinkNY’s single, central, secure platform will allow a healthcare provider to view a patients complete medical record rather than relying on transfer requests, faxes, phone calls, or even the patient to obtain this information. In this way, this expanded network will enable more efficient care coordination, reduce duplication of medical testing, and substantially cut healthcare costs.

STHL is a non-profit Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) that manages the Health Information Exchange (HIE) for its community. For patients who have given their providers consent to access the HIE, participation with STHL looks to improve care quality, care coordination, patient safety, healthcare outcomes, and reduce healthcare costs.

SOURCE: Marketwired