UNC Health Care has launched a new health information exchange (HIE) to improve the flow of reliable health information among their affiliated hospitals and physician practices throughout North Carolina, IBM officials announced Tuesday at HIMSS.

The HIE will assist healthcare providers in accessing electronic medical records, lab results and radiology reports.

Officials are touting the UNC Health Care health information exchange as the most advanced in the nation and as a model for the rest of North Carolina as well as other states.

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The health information exchange will seamlessly connect UNC Health Care's hospitals located in Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Siler City, N.C. Physician practices, long term care facilities and home health agencies throughout North Carolina will benefit from the system as well.

"Our vision is an integrated healthcare system that allows medical information to follow patients," said J.P. Kichak, chief information officer, UNC Health Care. "More importantly, we're building a health information exchange based on a national standard to help ensure when one of our patients goes outside of our system for any reason, their records can be accessed by other hospitals in keeping with the hope of one day contributing to a nationwide system of connected care."

Even though each hospital uses a different electronic medical record system, IBM HIE technology can interoperate with multiple systems. With IBM's master person index (MPI) patient information from multiple systems is maintained under one unique identifier.

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The UNC Health Care HIE is built on the IBM Health Integration Framework including IBM Initiate Exchange, IBM Initiate Patient and IBM Initiate Provider.

IBM officials also announced that the company is creating a new healthcare interoperability lab located in Chicago at the IBM Innovation Center. The new lab will allow IBM Business Partners to design, develop, install and test the latest healthcare technologies built on the IBM Health Integration Framework. The healthcare interoperability lab will also provide an environment for IBM Business Partners to showcase their validated health information exchange solution built on the Framework, said officials.