New York HIE surpasses 1 million participants

PARCA eNews – Oct. 22, 2018 – New York-based HEALTHeLINK, one of the early organizations adopting the Health Information Exchange (HIE) initiative recently reported surpassing the 1 million mark for patients consenting to have their health information exchanged among treating providers.

HEALTHeLINK is founding member of the nation consortium of HIEs called Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative, which is includes more than 60 HIEs in 38 states. Altogether the SHIEC provides health data on more than 250 million Americans.

The organization announced the significant milestone in its 2017 Report to the Community, released earlier this year. 

“The value of having a more complete picture of a patient’s clinical history at the point of care for both the provider and the patient is reflected through our annual report to the community and reinforced by results from a survey of Western New York health care consumers we conducted last year,” said Dan Porreca, HEALTHeLINK’s executive director in a press release. “Despite this success, the fact remains that we have more work to do and need more providers to utilize HIE to achieve our goals of enhancing patient care to its fullest potential as well as to mitigate rising health care costs.” 

In addition, the report highlighted:

• HEALTHeLINK utilization grew by 50 percent in western New York emergency departments in 2017 
• Alert notifications for exchanges of patient information between hospitals and practices grew by 558 providers covering 390,460 patients subscribed 
• A survey of patients revealed that 81 percent would encourage their doctors to us HEALTHeLINK. 
• The complete report is available on the HEALTHeLINK website. 

Source: HEALTHeLINK Report to the Community