Massachusetts HIE Kicks Off With Golden Spikes

If you’re a history buff, you may know of the Golden Spike connecting the eastgoing and westgoing tracks of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. It’s hard to overestimate how important that day was in the history of U.S. industry and transportation, despite the fact that it didn’t actually mark the day a seamless coast-to-coast rail network was completed.

This week, another big link-up was celebrated with ceremonial golden spikes, with some comparably high hopes attached. This one, however, was between disparate EMRs in Massachusetts, writes John Halamka, MD in Life As A Healthcare CIO:

Today we made history in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.   At 11:35am Governor Deval and his physician sent the Governor’s healthcare record from Massachusetts General Hospital to Baystate Medical Center.   It arrived and was integrated into Baystate’s Cerner medical record.

Lots of other demonstrations followed, pingponging data from hospitals to payers to physicians to the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (which measures quality and performs data analytics).

Among the most interesting facts Dr. Halamka noted was the list of varied EMRs that shared data, including Partners Healthcare’s LMR, eClinicalWorks, a custom payer system and self-built analytics applications.

What took place was no less than a revolutionary event, suggested Dr. Halamka:

Within seconds, we broke down silos, demonstrating that care coordination, population health, and quality analytics based on healthcare information exchange is now possible in Massachusetts.  

By the way, for those who haven’t crossed paths with the indefatigable Dr. Halamka, he’s Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. So his institution is central to this new effort (of which he’s quite justifiably proud).

My question is just how this trick was pulled off. Did the participants use the CCD format, Direct Project protocols, discrete data or something else?  Regardless of how the data’s being exchanged, it seems to me that the rest of the country should consider following suit.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

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