On the same day that a coalition of healthcare providers launched a new health information exchange in Connecticut, 10 healthcare affiliations in neighboring New York City launched their own exchange.

The New York Clinical Information Exchange (NYCLIX), Inc., consists of 11 hospitals (eight of which are in Manhattan), the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, a federally qualified health center and a faculty practice organization, encompassing about 840,000 emergency room visits, 470,000 discharges, 6.8 million outpatient visits and 5.9 million home visits annually. Incorporated in 2005, the not-for-profit group has received federal and state grants to create its health information exchange.

On Monday, NYCLIX announced that its member institutions are sharing data through the Centergy suite of health information exchange solutions provided by Cincinnati-based MedPlus, the healthcare IT subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics. The company’s portal technology, used by more than 80 healthcare IT systems, offers access to registration data, lab results, past diagnoses, clinical notes, medications, allergies and procedure codes from a number of data sources, including radiology, cardiology, pathology, endoscopy and EKG reports.

“Successful interoperability between various systems is key to a large-scale HIE initiative such as ours,” said Gilad J. Kuperman, MD, chairman of the NYCLIX board and director of interoperability informatics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “Our participating organizations include some of the largest hospitals in the most populous American city, and between inpatient and emergency department visits, account for more than a million encounters annually. As a partner, MedPlus was instrumental in not only interfacing a multitude of departmental and ancillary systems into a centralized and easy-to-use front end, but also in integrating the patient matching capabilities required by such an enormous endeavor.”

“NYCLIX has taken a great step forward in bringing the next generation of healthcare to the people of New York City,” said Richard Mahoney, president of MedPlus and vice president of healthcare information solutions at Quest Diagnostics. “Its seamless sharing of patient information among nine emergency rooms, a large community health center and the nation’s largest home care agency can provide significant improvements to overall healthcare for its patients, and serve as a model of interoperable HIT that can help improve patient outcomes.”

The new HIE links nine emergency rooms at Beth Israel Medical Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, NYU Medical Center, New York Presbyterian, Mount Sinai Medical Center, St. Vincent Medical Center, Staten Island University Hospital and SUNY Downstate, as well as the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the Institute for Family Health community health center.

NYCLIX is also providing data to the New York State Department of Health for a project sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control that is examining how HIEs can support biosurveillance and other public health goals.

As this HIE was being announced, Transforming Healthcare in Connecticut Communities (THICC) unveiled its own HIE just a little bit north in Connecticut. The broad-based coalition of 20 hospitals, several health centers and a number of physician organizations and group practices has teamed up with Chicago-based Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions to share data.