A North Carolina health information exchange has finished the first phase of an electronic health record project that lets physicians pull up patient data across more than a dozen hospitals.

The Western North Carolina Health Network HIE has installed a physician's portal from Medseek in hospitals in the region, including its latest deployment at Park Ridge Hospital in Hendersonville, N.C. Medseek describes itself as a provider of portal connectivity solutions.

Doctors who have privileges at any of the 16 facilities will be able to "search for a patient they are treating at that facility and obtain via the portal an aggregated view of that patient's visits across the other 15 facilities," said Brad Hawkins, director of account management at Medseek.

Emergency room doctors are among the portal's users. "We have seen high adoption with the ER doctors, but overall, across the facilities, the adoption has been high with primary care, internal medicine, [and] specialist" physicians as well, Hawkins said.

In the first phase of the portal project, Medseek linked its technology to 16 separate core clinical systems. Those include Cerner, Meditech, CPSI, McKesson, and Vista.

The portal project, named the Western North Carolina Health Network HIE – Data Link, has more than 2,000 active users, Hawkins said.

This fall, the firm will test a data exchange between community physicians and inpatient facilities. In the trial, Medseek's physician portal will connect office-based electronic medical record systems to the HIE network, according to Medseek. They will also focus on medication history and presenting ambulatory medication data from SureScripts/RxHub in this phase of the project, Hawkins said.

Medseek also works on an HIE project in Ontario, Canada. The company provides an HIE portal for five hospital corporations in the province, Hawkins said.