Health Information Exchanges (HIE)
HIEs are designed to securely exchange health information across settings and among stakeholders to improve individual care and population health.
Connecting Data Islands
When providers and patients have access to complete health information, they can make better decisions about their health, and care will be safer and more efficient. Heath Information Exchanges (HIEs) are designed to solve communication problems by providing the capability to securely exchange health information across settings and among stakeholders to improve individual care and population health. By enabling the flow of data across healthcare organizations, we expect positive outcomes due to more comprehensive views of patient information. These include decreased costs from fewer redundant tests across care settings, reduction in time spent gathering information about patients and greater efficiency in identifying patients requiring ongoing ambulatory care.
U.S. Experience
We led Massachusetts' development of the New England Health EDI Network (NEHEN). Its initial purpose was to provide administrative simplification services for a group of payers and providers in the Boston area. It now serves a larger group and extends into Rhode Island. We continue to manage the network as it handles more than 40 million transactions per month. This success led to CSC's opportunity to run MA-SHARE, a clinical information exchange initially sponsored by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Currently, we're working with the Eastern Massachusetts Healthcare Initiative (EMHI), a group of leading Boston-area payers, providers and academic institutions, to make NEHEN the platform for meeting meaningful use criteria for HIE.
State Quality Database Development
We also led the creation of a quality data warehouse, which extracts data from electronic medical record systems rather than the claims data used in similar warehouses, for the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. The Collaborative Quality Data Center (QDC) collects data from disparate EMRs associated with over 50 practice sites in three Massachusetts communities, computes quality measures based on the data, and provides standard and ad hoc reports to the practices, Collaborative staff and external researchers.
European Experience
In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) looked to CSC to help it make the country’s healthcare system the envy of the world for generations to come. We are the local NHS IT service provider for 60% of England; and we are passionately committed to delivering IT solutions that bring England’s GPs, hospitals and patients together within a more efficient, integrated healthcare system.
