It’s official: Chicago, Illinois-based Rush Health has deployed the first phase of a health information exchange.
Called Rush Health Connect, the HIE allows clinicians throughout Rush’s network to securely share data. They’ll now be able to see patient information from their EHR, even if it’s sent from a disparate EHR platform.
Currently, Rush Health Connect aggregates information from the Epic and Allscripts systems, which are used by numerous members of the Rush network. Eventually, Rush anticipates bringing in other EHR systems — like athenahealth and eClinicalWorks — that are used throughout the network.
“The goal of our HIE is to be the one-stop shop where providers find the correct clinical data on their patients regardless of where the patient has received care, allowing providers to either see the longitudinal or episodic clinical summary,” Rush Health CIO Julie Bonello told MedCity via email.
On top of that, Rush Health Connect gives clinicians real-time notifications, thereby improving care coordination. Its clinical analytics foundation, which gathers patient data each day, gives Rush experts the opportunity to better analyze recurring trends that can be used to improve care.
The HIE won’t assist providers alone. From a patient perspective, it will play a key role in improving the quality of care and ultimately lowering costs.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Rush worked with New York City, New York-based Ready Computing, a consulting firm, to customize InterSystems HealthShare, the platform that supports the HIE.
Why select InterSystems as opposed to another vendor?
The company set itself apart because it “possessed both private and public HIE experience, offered a complete HIE solution of their own technologies, allowed for customization and flexibility, and physically separated our data from other customer data,” Raymond Halper, Rush Health’s senior director of data management and application services, informed MedCity via email.
Halper continued, claiming both InterSystems and Ready Computing worked well with Rush. They “understood our ultimate goal to provide better care to our patients, and approached each discussion with that mindset and perspective,” he said.
And that’s good news, because this is only the first step in the process. Now that the initial phase of Rush Health Connect is complete, the next stage will be launched.
As part of phase two, Rush and Ready Computing will collaborate on a number of additional measures. Bonello explained: “The next phase of our HIE initiative is focused on on-boarding additional clinical partners, delivering advanced alerting and notification functionality, and leveraging analytics solutions to improve clinical outcomes.”
Photo: StationaryTraveller, Getty Images
