The Vermont Health Information Exchange will focus on major projects including a medication history for all consenting patients that will be initially available in the emergency departments of two pilot hospitals, and a chronic care information system that will help participating caregivers manage enrolled patients with diabetes.
Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL) will also focus on writing a state health information technology plan by July 2007, which will include the development of a statewide health information exchange that will connect providers, payors, and patients throughout the state of Vermont.
The HIE plans to facilitate data exchange between multiple Vermont healthcare stakeholders, and will be structured to allow standards-based applications from additional vendors and future stakeholders to plug into the network and add to the data being shared.
Additionally, through its open, standards-based architecture, VITL will enable clinicians across the state utilizing third-party EMR systems to access the health information exchange.
Orion Health will also assist the statewide initiative, providing its Concerto medical applications portal to review and report chronic disease data, Concerto Clinicals Disease Management application to manage and leverage that data, and its Rhapsody Integration Engine to ensure smooth communication between new and existing information management systems and partner applications.
The chronic care project will leverage technology from Orion Health in conjunction with GE’s Centricity electronic medical record (EMR) software to eventually save data within the Centricity EMR so that clinicians can readily view historical patient information.
VITL received $1.4 million in funding from the state. Over the next five years, revenue generated from various offerings is projected to make the health information exchange financially self-sustaining.
We expect the health information exchange will play a significant role in reining in spiraling healthcare costs, especially for the state’s Medicaid population, said Cy Jordan, MD, MPH, and chair of VITL. The greatest value to be realized, however, will be in the reduction of medical errors, the elimination of duplicate diagnostic procedures, better management of chronic illness, and overall improvement in the quality of healthcare statewide.
