The Alaska eHealth Network started the New Year by initiating a Health Information Exchange (HIE) pilot to help Alaska’s volunteer hospitals and ambulatory clinics. According to AeHN’s publication “Exchange”, the first phase of the pilot now connects four hospitals and four clinics. Upon completion of the pilot phase in April 2011 AeHN will begin to implement HIE services statewide.
Initial pilot sites include Alaska Heart Institute, Alaska Native Medical Center, Bartlett Regional Hospital, Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, Providence Hospital, Tanana Valley Clinic in Fairbanks, and Valley Medical Center in Juneau. The selected HIE vendor Orion Health will expand the number of sites and provide for over 300 interfaces in 2011.
Initial HIE services provide the secure exchange of laboratory data, to do e-prescribing, provide demographics data, and to provide admission discharge and transfer data. Priority for data selection was determined based on the requirements for “meaningful use” set by CMS.
With one common interface to the HIE, providers are able to connect with many services across Alaska, thus, eliminating the need to develop and manage multiple electronic health record interfaces.
For more information, contact AeHN’s Director Bill Sorrells, at bill@ak-ehealth.org.
