February 2018 Newsletter
Alert Fatigue? Not In Central New York!
HealtheConnections’ Unique Delivery Methods Make a Difference
HealtheConnections (HeC) offers the healthcare community diverse and unique ways to receive patient alerts. With more than 300 organizations and 2000 providers receiving alerts, it became obvious that we needed to create a way for each to choose their own combination of how and when to be notified of patient events. We listened to our providers about the potential constant stream of alerts and developed both push and pull strategies as choices to best fit with alert recipient workflows.
There are three facets of alerts that HeC used as the basis of its alerting infrastructure: type of alert, triggering criteria, and delivery method. HeC started out with the basic alert types of Emergency Department (ED) Admit, Inpatient Admit, and Inpatient Discharge. Medication Adherence and ED Admits within the Last 30 Days are alerts that were added to enhance the choices available to our participants.
A participating organization can also choose the triggering criteria by which it wants to receive alerts. First, a consent-based trigger can be selected and an alert will be sent for any patient with a “yes” consent for that organization. A subscription list can also be used to reduce the number of alerts to a selected subset of patients. Lastly, another choice is to receive a provider-based alert. Similar to results delivery, an alert will be sent to a participating provider when named on a patient’s record.
HealtheConnections’ unique approach to alerts is mainly in its delivery methods. As with most “push” alerting methods, HeC can send a notification via text, email, or Direct Mail to a recipient. These real-time alerts can be most useful for care management to address a patient’s needs as soon as possible. However, the real difference for HeC participants is to “pull” alerts when they need them within their workflow. For these types of alerts, HealtheConnections offers myAlerts, which is a comprehensive list of alerts that is filterable and has delegation capability to others within the participating organization to access. Another key distinction as a delivery method is the Daily Digest, which is a summary of alerts for the last 24 hours that is available by 6:30am every morning. Ninety percent of HeC’s alerts are delivered via Daily Digest and myAlerts.
HealtheConnections will continue to innovate solutions with more custom-based alerts in the future and other features that best meet our healthcare community’s needs.
Reminder for Regulated Facilities
The State Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) Regulation requires Article 28, 36, and 40 facilities to participate and share data with their local RHIO. More information may be found at the following:
- “What Regulated Facilities Need to Know”, webinar recording and slides may be accessed here
- Information on the SHIN-NY Regulation waiver is available here
- For more information on the Data Exchange Incentive Program (DEIP), which was reviewed during the webinar, please visit the DEIP page on our website so that you may access overview documents, a recent DEIP webinar recording, and webinar slides
- Users Accessing the HIE: 2,422
- Logins: 44,457
- Documents Viewed: 132,866
- Total Patients Accesses: 43,884
- Clinical Records Received: 7,214,861
- Patient Encounter Summaries (CCDs) Received: 668,203
- Results Delivered: 228,277
- Total Practices: 144
- Total Recipients: 1,669
- Emergency Department Registration: 132,884
- Inpatient Admission:55,925
- Discharge from Inpatient Stay: 40,227
- Total Users: 3,183
- Hospitals: 22
- Labs: 27 *includes hospitals
- Imaging Centers: 28 *includes hospitals
- Practices/Other: 211
- Hospitals: 23
- Practices: 438
- Public Health: 12
- FQHCs: 9
- Behavioral Health: 135
- Other Healthcare Entities: 184
- Labs: 28 *including hospitals
- Radiology Centers: 41 *includes hospitals
myConnections: A New Experience
By now, most of you have seen HealtheConnections’ new look for the myConnections HIE portal. This refreshed design offers a streamlined user experience letting our authorized users access the information they need in an easy-to-use, highly functional dashboard.
All the functions our users value are still easily accessible, like Patient Lookup, Alerts, Direct Mail, and we introduced some new features for 2018. Training materials, forms, user guides, featured videos, news, and more are now conveniently stored all in one place! Just click on the graduation cap on the left sidebar to access Training and Reference Materials. Much of this information has been on the HealtheConnections website, but we’ve made it available to users through the portal that they use every day. Users have commented that the layout is easy to use and navigate!
If you are an authorized user and haven’t logged in yet, click here to experience the new myConnections, or visit us at healtheconnections.org.
New Participants
American Anesthesiology of Syracuse PC
CAP: Robert Hesson MD dba: Ithaca Dialysis Center
CNY Retinal Associates PC
Dr Jay Dewell
Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes Inc
New Data Sources
Dr Jay Dewell
EMR Integrations in Process
HealtheConnections is currently in the process of implementing with the following Electronic Medical Records systems. These EMRs represent multiple organizations within the HeC footprint and will allow for their data to be shared with the community. If you use one of these EMRs and are interested in sharing your data, contact HealtheConnections Support at 315.671.2241 x5.
| EMR | Functionality | Data Type |
| Point Click Care | CCDs inbound to HeC | Long Term Care Data |
| McKesson Paragon | Bi-directional CCD flow | Acute Hospital Data |
| QS1 PrimeCare | HL7v2 inbound to HeC | Pharmacy / Prescription Data |
| AllScripts ProEHR | Bi-directional CCD flow | Practice Data |
| Carena Telehealth | CCDs inbound to HeC | Acute Telehealth Data |
January HIE Statistics
Patient Lookup
Data Contribution
Results Delivery
Alerts
Direct Mail
Data Contributors
831 Participating Organizations