March 18, 2008
Healthcare IT News
"HealthBridge Data Exchange Gives Boost to e-Prescribing, Diabetes Registry"
By Patty Enrado
CINCINNATI - HealthBridge, a Cincinnati-based community health information exchange, has
won a grant to enable e-prescribing and another to develop a disease registry. Both projects
- already under way - will leverage HealthBridge's core messaging system.
While the HIE, which is profitable and employs a fee-for-service model, doesn't apply
for many grants, both grants ensure long-term funding for projects that are within its mission,
said Keith Hepp, CFO and vice president of business development.
The $45,000 grant, which was awarded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky in December
and runs through June, will pay for the capital work to get e-prescribing up and running.
That includes upgrading the portal to enable e-prescribing on handhelds and integration with
HealthBridge's master patient index (MPI).
Using an MPI for e-prescribing eliminates the cost and effort of integrating with an
electronic medical record or practice management system. Integration with an MPI also
eliminates the need for interfaces, which significantly reduce operational cost and make
it possible for HealthBridge to fold the operational cost into its general budget, said
Hepp.
"This is a demonstration of how exchanges can help in these endeavors. The key is that
e-prescribing costs a fraction because we have the existing infrastructure," he said.
Through its core messaging system, HealthBridge delivers 2.2 million clinical messages,
or results, per month. It is the platform that enables reporting to public health departments.
There are 2.2 million people within the 14 counties HealthBridge serves. Thus far, 1.9 million
people are in its MPI, but Hepp said the goal is 100 percent coverage, which would make e-prescribing
and disease registries more robust.
The disease registry is a quality improvement and reporting project funded by the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and involves the entire
Cincinnati community. For the "Aligning Forces for Quality"
project, HealthBridge is deploying a disease registry that will be used by physician practices
to improve care for their diabetes patients.
The HIE will also be instrumental in large-scale collection of diabetes quality-of-care
data from these practices.
"Cincinnati is the only one of the 14 communities involved in the project that has
an operational HIE, so this is really a trailblazing kind of project," said Trudi Matthews,
HealthBridge's director of policy and public relations.
Hepp said the HIE's messaging system will produce long-term administrative
savings for this project.
"We already have a rich set of clinical data," he said, noting that 96 percent
of all results in the community are electronic. "We think we can dramatically improve the
measurement of diabetes compliance because we have electronic data."
The diabetes registry began at the end of December 2007. HealthBridge is enrolling and
training physician practices on how to report data, and tracking the physician practice and
community levels.
Hepp said HealthBridge hopes payers will coordinate with the HIE and tie
pay-for-performance to diseases, using the disease registries.
"We could have done e-prescribing and disease registry (on our own)," he said.
It made financial sense, however, to take advantage of funded projects.
"We are reusing basic infrastructure and processes to make standalone products.
Stakeholders get that we can leverage our infrastructure," said Hepp. |
