Geisinger, KeyHIE bolster clinician productivity an hour a day with patient alerts
The Keystone Health Information Exchange, also known as KeyHIE, a collaborative HIE that includes Geisinger Health System, employs what it calls the Information Delivery Service “push” messaging technology designed to enable proactive care with real-time delivery of alerts, notifications and critical patient information to clinicians and care managers across the community.
The Information Delivery Service’s centralized aggregation technology brings all of a patient’s data into a single record. The system identifies chronically ill and at-risk patients and consolidates a community’s health data in one place to help care managers and accountable care organizations manage diverse population groups. And clinicians can customize their subscriptions to important alerts, notifications and patient information updates.
One of the goals of the Information Delivery Service is to advance the practice of population health.
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“We did an analysis on the impact of the patient notifications on home health nurses,” said Kim Chaundy, IT director at Geisinger Health Systems and director of operations at KeyHIE. “We send home health nurses notifications if their patients end up in the emergency room or are transferred to an inpatient setting. During the period we analyzed, we saved these nurses more than one hour of effort per day because the real-time notifications prevented the nurses from driving to locations only to find patients not there.”
This, in turn, allowed nurses to render care to other patients, as well as quickly reach out to emergency room physicians to discuss patient treatment options that would get patients back home and prevent readmissions to hospitals, Chaundy said.
Chaundy explained how the Information Delivery Service works.
“Information is in the form of an admission-discharge-transfer (ADT) transaction that comes through the HIE,” she said. “We have a rules engine that interprets each component of the information and identifies the clinician within the HL7-standard message. The system then triggers the rules engine, figures out what information the relevant clinician selected for notifications, and immediately delivers the information directly to the clinician.”
The system sends messages in the manner selected by individual clinicians – via direct secure message, via secure text message, or directly injected into an electronic health records system.
“For Geisinger, a clinician might be monitoring a patient because the patient has a chronic condition,” Chaundy explained. “The clinician, for example, wants to be messaged when any clinical information comes into the system from an outsourced facility. Say a patient gets admitted to an emergency room and lab work is done; the clinician and patient are identified within the lab work message and the system sends the clinical lab results to the clinician via an HL7 ORU message directly into the clinician’s EHR system. So the clinical information goes directly into the patient’s chart.”
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Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
