Information firms to meet Monday.
Two of the state’s three health information exchanges are based in Columbia and, so far, they are not connected. But that could soon change.
Mark Pasquale, who was hired as CEO for Missouri Health Connection just two months ago, said Friday during a health information exchange round-table event that his organization will meet Monday with representatives of the Tiger Institute Health Alliance to discuss the common goal of making all individual electronic health records available to every physician in the state.
Pasquale said Missouri Health Connection’s network already includes about 70 percent of patients in the state.
“I’m feeling optimistic,” said Michael Seda, director of business development for Tiger Institute for Health Innovation, based at the University of Missouri.
Missouri Health Connection, Tiger Institute and the Lewis and Clark Information Exchange, or LACIE, were featured during a panel discussion at yesterday’s round-table at the Courtyard Marriott. Health providers and health technology vendors were among the audience members, and some pointed out that Tiger Institute and LACIE are connected, while Tiger Institute and Missouri Health Connection are not.
In practical terms, that means the electronic health record of a patient that goes to Missouri Health Connection member Boone Hospital Center from MU Health Care or University Hospital would not be available to medical staff at the other hospital — even though the two hospitals are less than 2 miles apart.
Previous discussions about connecting the two health information networks have been stymied by disagreements over cost.
MU officials have said the Tiger Alliance wants to share data with Missouri Health Connection, but not for a fee. MHC officials have said its fees are based on the type and size of member organizations and that the Tiger Alliance was not being asked to do something other members were not doing.
Tom Selva, chief medical information officer for MU Healthcare, passed a note with Pasquale during yesterday’s roundtable. The note said: “Set the data free.” He said the patient data should not belong to any one information exchange.
“We are much closer to having that data set free,” Selva said. “I don’t think we’re that far away.”
One of the primary aims of electronic health records and health information networks is to improve quality of care and increase patient safety by having the same patient information available from doctor to doctor. The electronically shared medical record information also is seen as an important step in reducing preventable errors and duplication of treatment.
Yesterday’s event, sponsored by the Midwest Gateway Chapter of Health Information and Management Systems Society, also featured Laura Adams, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Quality Institute, which operates Rhode Island’s health information exchange.
Adams is a cancer survivor and consumer advocate who talks about how she discovered the absence of a strong health information system “at a point in time when my life was hanging in the balance.”
She remembered finding out that the results of a medical test had been available for 11 days, yet she had not been told the results were in.
“Those weren’t 11 days,” Adams said. “Those were 11 sleepless nights.”
She also talked about coming to terms with the need for a mastectomy when she discovered a radiologist’s record that said she was to have a double mastectomy — which was not true.
“What if I didn’t speak English? What if I was elderly?” she said.
This article was published in the Saturday, April 5, 2014 edition of the Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline “Health networks closer to connection: Information firms to meet Monday.”
