CIO Reveals Secrets to HIE

Inspira Health Network is a community health system comprising three hospitals in southern New Jersey, with more than 5,000 employees and 800 affiliated physicians. It is an early adopter of health information exchange technology. In this Q&A-style paper their CIO and Director of Ambulatory Informatics share secrets to their successful Health Information Exchange implementation.

One of the most impressive numbers from their HIE implementation is that they were able to get 600 providers using the portal and 36 EMRs connected. Plus, they were able to get their HIE up and running in 4 months while many of the public HIEs were still working on their implementations. As I’ve written about previously, I see a lot of potential in the Private HIE. So, it’s great to see a first hand account from a CIO about their private HIE implementation.

Here are some of the other benefits the CIO identifies in the paper:

  • Ties the Physician Community to the Organization
  • Helps Meet the Meaningful Use Patient Engagement Requirements
  • Helps Address Care Coordination Requirements
  • Paper, Postage, and Staff Resource Savings
  • Improve Patient Length of Stay

Check out the full Q&A for a lot of other insights including rolling out the HIE to doctors who have an EMR and those who don’t. I also love that the CIO confirmed that the biggest technical challenge is that every EHR vendor has interpreted the HL7 standard differently based on the technical limitations of the application. This is why I’m so impressed that they were able to get 36 EMRs connected.

I hope more CIOs will share their stories of success. We’ve heard enough bad news in healthcare IT. I want to cover more health IT success stories.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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