A hospital in northern Louisiana recently became the first rural health care facility in the state to transmit patient information to a statewide health information exchange.
Richland Parish Hospital in Delhi, La., successfully sent data to the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHIX), which serves as a repository for patient information. Also known as Delhi Hospital, it is the first facility in the 44-member Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition to link with LARHIX.
The demonstration showed how the exchange of patient information — in this case, Delhi Hospital and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport — supports telemedicine.
The Delhi Hospital transmitted clinical information, patient information and radiological images via Health Level 7 messaging, said Dave Pulver, vice president of sales at Dairyland Healthcare Solutions. The company, based in Glenwood, Minn., is Delhi Hospital’s health information system vendor.
The ability to consult with a specialist remotely would save a patient in Delhi about a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Shreveport, Pulver said.
Delhi Hospital is the first of 44 rural hospitals that will eventually connect to LSU Health Sciences Center facilities. The initiative to link rural hospitals is funded with $13 million in appropriations the Louisiana legislature authorized in 2007. Additional funding is expected this year.
The 2007 funding is helping seven hospitals upgrade their information systems, with the aim of making it possible for them to share data.
The main goal of the upgrades is to improve rural community hospitals’ systems and enable them to transmit data to LARHIX, Pulver said.
Four of the seven hospitals participating in the initial phase of the project are deploying Dairyland’s financial and clinical solutions, according to the company.
Vendors supporting LARHIX include CA, Carefx, IBM and Initiate Systems. Carefx’s Fusion product provides the platform, architecture and aggregate view of patient data; IBM’s Websphere provides the portal framework; CA contributes single sign-on, policy-based authorization, identity federation and access auditing; and Initiate Systems supplies the enterprise master person index.
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.
