After having served in an interim role since the start of the year, HealthlinkNY has appointed Staci Romeo as the organization’s permanent executive director. She most recently served as HealthlinkNY’s senior VP and had previously worked as its comptroller, the organization said in a May 31 news release. HealthlinkNY operates the health-information exchange (HIE) connecting […]
After having served in an interim role since the start of the year, HealthlinkNY has appointed Staci Romeo as the organization’s permanent executive director.
She most recently served as HealthlinkNY’s senior VP and had previously worked as its comptroller, the organization said in a May 31 news release.
HealthlinkNY operates the health-information exchange (HIE) connecting providers and patients in 13 counties in the Southern Tier, Hudson Valley, and Catskills regions of New York. It has offices in Binghamton and Hopewell Junction in Dutchess County, according to its website.
Romeo replaces Christina Galanis, who had served as president and CEO of HealthlinkNY. Galanis departed the organization in December to become president of an organization called WOMBA in New York City.
“Staci stepped in to ensure that HealthlinkNY did not miss a beat after the change in leadership, and then quickly executed several initiatives that have led to rapid growth of our health-information exchange,” Dr. Rajesh Davé, chairman of the HealthlinkNY board of directors, said. “She developed a vision for this organization’s future, and a solid plan to get us there.”
Under Romeo’s leadership, HealthlinkNY renewed its focus on the “customer,” or the providers who use the HIE to view their patients’ medical histories. Through the HIE, they can connect to their patients’ other health-care providers.
To make the HIE more “provider-friendly,” Romeo reorganized staff to create a unit dedicated to serving existing provider users; expanded the group dedicated to adding new providers; and moved HealthlinkNY’s help-desk group so the chief-information officer can supervise it. HealthlinkNY has also started offering providers “generous incentives to connect and contribute data,” per the release.
“We want providers to sign up and use the HIE,” Romeo said. “The underlying mission of HealthlinkNY is to make people and communities healthier. When providers can see their patient’s complete health picture, and when they can have quick, easy, and secure access to the health records they need from the patient’s other providers, then health-care quality is improved, health-care costs are reduced, and the patient receives the best treatment possible. That’s what makes this job so fulfilling.”
About the HealthlinkNY HIE
The HealthlinkNY HIE offers electronic access to patients’ community-wide health records and serves as the region’s access point to the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), “supporting collaboration” between health-care providers across the state.
The SHIN-NY connects eight regional networks, “or qualified entities (QEs), which allow participating health-care professionals, with patient consent, to quickly access electronic-health information and securely exchange data with any other participant in the state,” according to the website of the New York City–based New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC).
HealthlinkNY is funded by the nonprofit NYeC (pronounced “nice”).
NYeC works with the New York State Department of Health to “improve health care by collaboratively leading, connecting, and integrating health information exchange (HIE) across the state,” according to its website.
Statistics
HealthlinkNY says it has added 53 new provider organizations to the HIE since the beginning of the year, bringing its total number of participating provider organizations to 341.
Romeo also noted that in the year’s first five months, HealthlinkNY already has “exceeded or nearly met” participation goals set by NYeC for all of 2018.
Providers are using the HIE more too, HealthlinkNY contends. Since the beginning of the year, providers have pulled records for 377,175 patients for the first five months of 2018, compared to 239,311 for the same period a year earlier. The 2018 figure represents a 57.6 percent increase over last year.
HealthlinkNY is working with providers to collect consent forms from patients, who can choose to allow, not allow, or allow only in emergencies access to their HIE records.
As of May 24, HealthlinkNY had collected 1,540,864 total patient consents, a figure that includes patients who live in HealthlinkNY’s 13-county service area in the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Southern Tier, as well as other New York counties.
“The more provider organizations that participate, the more patients who consent, and the more times the HIE is used, the more valuable the HIE becomes,” Romeo said.