Southern Tier HealthLink adds Lourdes’ Dr. Gupta to board

BINGHAMTON — Southern Tier HealthLink NY (STHL), a Binghamton–based nonprofit regional health information organization, announced that Dr. Hemant Gupta of Lourdes Memorial Hospital has joined its board of directors.

Gupta is the chief medical informatics officer (CMIO) at Lourdes in Binghamton. He oversees the IT needs for the organization and its health-care staff as well as allied health departments connecting to its electronic medical-record (EMR) system.

Dr. Gupta is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, completing his residency in internal medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is a board certified internal-medicine physician, and has five years of combined experience as a community hospitalist, a primary-care physician, and an academic hospitalist. Gupta has worked in medical informatics for more than a decade and has extensive knowledge in clinical-decisions support systems and EMR. He also worked as a medical information officer at Holyoke Medical Center in Massachusetts, where he coordinated and completed the rollout of computerized provider order entry and physician documentation for the hospital.

“Southern Tier HealthLink is pleased to have Dr. Hemant Gupta join our board of directors. His experience as chief medical informatics officer and his extensive knowledge of clinical decision support systems and EMRs will provide an important dimension to our work as we continue to build and improve our provider and patient interface plans,” Christina Galanis, STHL executive director, said in a news release.

STHL is in the process of transitioning to a new service model, partnering with the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) to use that organization’s Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) service model. The move could eventually slash STHL’s technology-licensing costs by two-thirds.

It will transfer Southern Tier HealthLink’s health information exchange (HIE) off a software platform from New York City–based Infor to one from Cambridge, Mass.–based InterSystems Corp. A health-information exchange gives authorized medical providers in a certain area access to patient information and medical histories in real time. Southern Tier HealthLink is in charge of building a HIE for Broome, Chenango, Tioga, Delaware, and Otsego counties.

“I look forward to working closely with our HIE as it transitions to New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and it’s Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) platform. Greater heights can be achieved through honest collaboration,” Gupta said in the release.

Southern Tier HealthLink (www.sthlny.com) says it was established with leadership and support from UHS, Lourdes Hospital, and other health-care stakeholders in 2005.

Contact Rombel at arombel@cnybj.com