Upstate RHIO collaboration links hospitals in a 44-county region

SYRACUSE — Four upstate New York Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) on Friday announced new connectivity allowing “secure” exchange of electronic medical records between health-care professionals in Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany.

 

This new connectivity between the upstate RHIOs links 110 hospitals in a 44‐county region and allows providers to “securely” share 5.4 million patient-health records, according to HealtheConnections.

 

HealtheConnections (pronounced “healthy connections”) is the RHIO serving 11 counties in Central New York, according to the organization’s website.

 

The counties include Onondaga, Cayuga, Oswego, Madison, Cortland, Tompkins, Oneida, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence.

 

The collaboration will support patients who seek medical attention outside their region, move out of their region, or find themselves in an emergency outside their region within upstate New York, the organization said.

 

Through this new connectivity, providers will be able to “better coordinate care and reduce health care costs,” HealtheConnections contends.

 

The new connectivity allows health-care professionals from each region to send and receive EMRs by way of “secure and encrypted” messaging through the capability of each RHIO’s Health Information Service Provider (HISP) based upon the Direct Project protocol, HealtheConnections said.

 

The Direct Project protocol enables standards‐based health-information exchange in support of meaningful-use measures, including communication of summary-care records, referrals, discharge summaries, and other clinical documents in support of continuity of care and medication reconciliation, and communication of laboratory results to providers.

 

Meaningful use is the set of standards defined by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) incentive programs that govern the use of electronic health records and allows eligible providers and hospitals to earn incentive payments by meeting specific criteria, according to website healthit.gov, a government website with details and policy information about the sharing of electronic health records.

 

The Upstate collaboration includes Hixny, the RHIO serving New York’s Capital Region, according to HealtheConnections.

 

Hixny established “similar connectivity” with Vermont in July as it worked to support a region where patients seek health-care services in Northern New York and Vermont, Mark McKinney, CEO of Hixny, said in the news release.

 

“We’re happy to collaborate with the RHIOs in Central and Western New York as well as those in New England to expand this service area. These are important collaborations as Hixny prepares to launch its secure patient portal in 2014. Patients in our region will be empowered to securely view, download, and transmit their own medical records via Direct throughout upstate New York and to an ever-growing service area,” McKinney said. 

 

Hixny connects more than 1.55 million people in 17 counties throughout the Capital District and Northern New York.

 

 

 

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com