By Claire Hughes,
Jay Stearns has kept a thick file folder for the last four years stocked with medical and prescription records for his octogenarian father, who has congestive heart failure.
When his father was admitted to Ellis Hospitalin August, Stearns logged onto an electronic patient portal that let him easily track his father’s medical care. Especially helpful, he said, were prescription records that let him easily see which medications his father was still taking.
“The portal has been a tremendous tool to look through and find all his important papers and records,” said the Rotterdam resident, speaking at an event at Ellis to promote the data access.
To comply with the federal Affordable Care Act, Capital Region hospitals and doctors’ offices are offering patients ways to access their records electronically, using means like Ellis’ portal, established by Hixny, a Latham-based nonprofit. Saratoga Hospital and four others from Hudson to Plattsburgh have also given patients access through Hixny, which has over the last 15 years laid the foundation for area doctors and hospitals to share data. Albany Medical Center and St. Peter’s Health Partners use software from other companies for their patient portals.
The goal is to more fully engage patients in their care, improve services and cut costs, by eliminating duplication of procedures and reducing returns to the hospital for the same ailment.
Statewide, the objective is to link hospitals, medical providers and patients through nine regional health information networks like Hixny, said Patrick Roohan, director of the stateHealth Department’s Office of Quality & Patient Safety. The current state budget includes $55 million to connect the regional health information organizations, or RHIOs; the plan is to link medical data statewide by next summer.
In the Capital Region, doctors and hospital staff have already plugged in to the Hixny network to share information about patients, especially those who wind up in an emergency room. What’s new at Ellis, Saratoga and other hospitals is that since summer, patients can now access the Hixny data, too.
St. Peter’s purchased different software, called My Health, for its portal because it wanted to launch earlier than Hixny was ready, and wanted patients to be able to schedule medical appointments or e-mail a doctor within its system, said Chief Information Officer Jonathan Goldberg. St. Peter’s got My Health off the ground in April. Its second phase will be to link the portal with Hixny, so patients can also view their records from outside St. Peter’s medical offices and hospitals in Albany and Troy, Goldberg said.
Albany Med and two large area doctor’s practices, CapitalCare Medical Group and Community Care Physicians, chose portal software called Follow My Health, according to medical center spokesman Jeffrey Gordon. Albany Med’s portal also launched in April.
In the Rochester area, a regional health information organization like Hixny has operated for seven years. Its linkage of hospitals, doctors and patients has resulted in a 57 percent decline in hospital readmissions, as well as reductions in laboratory and radiology tests, like X-rays and CT scans, Roohan said. Statewide, such savings are expected to save $200 million a year in medical costs, he said.
Sharing health data throughout a community has other benefits.
“Such a network will reduce disease investigation time, lower administrative costs and help treat patients faster, which will protect all of us from large-scale outbreaks like the measles or the flu,” Roohan said.
Civil liberties groups have raised concerns that the sharing of medical information through RHIOs could result in privacy breaches. Patients must consent to the release of their information through Hixny, except in emergencies, said Mark McKinney, the nonprofit’s CEO. Safeguards are in place to ensure data is accessed only under strict guidelines, even in cases where patients are unconscious or otherwise unable to provide consent, he said.
