The State of Indiana provides healthcare for a population that has significantly higher rates than the national median for a variety of chronic diseases. Nearly 9.6 percent of the 455,000 residents in Indiana have diabetes which is more than the national average of 8.2 percent. Also, it is a fact that many people in the state aren’t getting the health screenings that they need for certain cancers.
The Central Indiana Beacon Community led by HHS enacted as a result of the HITECH Act, is trying to address these issues through better collection and use of data and by making improvements to the health system.
To rectify the need for better healthcare, the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) now supports a network of more than 25,000 physicians and 90 hospitals throughout the state. The collaboration between the Decatur County Memorial Hospital (DCMH) based in Greenburg Indiana and the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) is supported in part by the Central Indian Beacon Community.
To provide the information flow, the “DOCS4DOCS” Service is an electronic results delivery service provided by IHIE. The system offers a single sourced for clinical information such as lab results, radiology reports, transcriptions, pathology and hospital admissions reports, discharge and transfer reports from all participating Indiana hospitals, physician practices, labs and radiology centers. Results can be viewed through a web-based portal or delivered directly into the EMR system at no cost to the provider.
In a recent move, DCMH connected to the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE) through the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) which encompasses hospitals, long term care facilities, and other healthcare providers throughout the state to enable physicians to securely access necessary information.
INPC includes information from encounters covering over 90 percent of care provided at hospitals in the Indianapolis area. The network handles over a million secure health transactions daily that contain:
- 3 billion pieces of clinical data supporting care for an area with a population of about 6 million people
- 80 million radiology images
- 50 million text reports
- 750,000 EKG readings
- Discharge summaries, operative notes, pathology reports, medication records, patient abstracts, and trend data
