INDIANAPOLIS – Thanks to access to prescription data from across the country, the emergency department at Wishard Hospital can treat patients faster than ever – even if they’ve never been treated at Wishard before.

“It’s like night and day,” said emergency physician J.T. Finnell, MD, of the new system that provides filled-prescription histories to the docs. “When a patient arrives, his or her medical chart is processed and we receive one or two pages of history and lab results in 30 to 60 seconds.”

The health information exchange is the product of a collaboration between Initiate Systems, the Regenstrief Institute and RxHub, with the Indianapolis Network for Patient Care (INCP). The regional health information organization has already shown it can locate prescription data from forty-nine states for ED teams in sixteen Indiana hospitals in a under a minute.

To pull off that feat, the hospitals work with Regenstrief, which has connections to more than 90 clinical databases, and RxHub, which has access to claims data for 160 million individuals from pharmacy benefits management sites across the country. Initiate’s enterprise master patient index ensures that incoming data belongs to the patient.

“Emergency rooms have compressed time, a high patient volume and lack of information, which necessitates the fast delivering of medication information,” said Lorraine Fernandes, senior vice president of Healthcare Practice at Initiate. “Scalability is not a limiting factor whether it be 10 or 100 million records.”

The success of this venture could advance efforts to build a national health information network, according to those involved in the projects.

Eric Brown, an analyst from Forrester, cites the industry as a major investor for this development. “Every time someone does something right in that clinic, information sharing technology benefits because the stakeholders know that this is a good thing for IT.”