The launch of a new data exchange network by the New Mexico Health Information Collaborative will facilitate the sharing of electronic health records between health care providers across the state, including hospitals, insurers and physicians in private practice.
By some accounts, the sharing ofelectronic health records(EHRs) serves to benefit not only patients with regard to time, but will also cut provider costs and create more efficient health care environments.
Created and powered by New Zealand health software company Orion Health, the health information exchange network aims to expedite administrative processes for both patients and providers by allowing health care providers to access patient health records, regardless of whether or not said patient has been seen at a given facility.
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The project, which originally launched in 2010 with a different vendor, was more than two years in the making, according to Thomas East, CEO and CIO of NMHIC.
“The overarching goal of what we’re hoping to accomplish is that health care information will be there when and where it’s needed for effective patient care,” said East.
There are costs to health care providers for both funneling patient data into the network as well as accessing it. On the front end, health care providers will pay a non-recurring fee related to building the interface that allows them to deposit EHR data into the network; on the back end, health care providers will pay a fee to access the patient data.
According to East, hospitals will pay a “per-bed fee,” and for those in private practice the fee is per physician. NMHIC’s fee model is based on a public utility model where the cost is based on who gets value from the system.
Although debate around ownership of patient health records and privacy complications abound, the new platform complies with state and federal regulations, as well as HIPAA requirements.
Dr. Martin Hickey, CEO of New Mexico Health Connections, says that HIEs are valuable not only in helping save patients time, but also to providers and insurers.
“A lot of tests get redone over and over again, so there are significant savings to us that we can pass on to our members via premiums. It allows us to turn down the duplication of testing, for example – especially with tests like MRIs and CAT scans, which can be redone several times in one week. … Patients move from health plan to health plan or provider to provider, so rather than reinvent everything, you can get ahold of the past history — digital records — and that saves an immense amount of time,” he said.
NMHIC currently receive EHRs from 52 percent of all hospital beds in New Mexico, largely from facilities around the Rio Grande corridor, and the organization has signed up more than 1,200 physicians to use the system.
Approximately 1.6 terabytes of medical records — more than 800 million pages — are stored on the HIE network. East said NMHIC hopes to expand into rural areas of the state within the next year.
