A Jacksonville, Fla., community health care organization plans to launch a health information exchange (HIE) with a technology rollout slated for summer.
The North East Florida Regional Health Organization (NEFRHO) recently announced its selection of Carefx’s Fusion, an information aggregation application. The Carefx software will provide a portal that will bring together hospitals and physicians.
The HIE is funded through a grant from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Health Information Network.
In the project’s first phase, NEFRHO’s portal will be integrated with Availity’s electronic health claims clearinghouse. Availity, based in Jacksonville, launched in 2001 to electronically link physicians with multiple health care plans.
Participants in this initial phase will include two hospitals and about 150 physicians.
The Availity link up will let the exchange avoid duplication of effort, according to Mark Renfro, executive director at NEFRHO. Availity, for example, provides an enterprise master patient index that covers 92 percent of patient records in Florida. The company last year selected Initiate Systems’ identity matching software to provide this feature.
Building a patient identification system locally, Renfro said, would have “cost a lot of money and duplicated their efforts.”
Similarly, the NEFRHO exchange will use Availity’s authentication capability, which Renfro said currently authenticates 98 percent of physicians in Florida.
NEFRHO also plans to use Carefx to pull together clinical information from hospital applications. Renfro said the exchange won’t be limited to hospitals; NEFRHO plans to bring in commercial laboratories and independent radiology and imaging centers as the rollout continues.
Karen Friedrich, Carefx vice president of national accounts, said the company has seen increased activity among exchanges recently. “We are doing additional business on a much more regular basis in the HIE space,” she said.
One such customer, the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange, will go live with its project later this month, she said.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
