CINCINNATI – Bloomington, Ind., and Clark and Champaign counties in Ohio announced the launch of their community health information exchanges, or HIEs, in September.
By leveraging the technology infrastructure of the largest HIE in the country – HealthBridge – the two HIEs will increase their speed to market and fund value-added services for their communities.
For a monthly fee based on community size and annual hospital expenses, Bloomington’s e-Health Collaborative and Clark and Champaign Counties HIE, or CCHIE, will have access to HealthBridge’s data centers, a clinical messaging system from vendor Axolotl, and services and staff.
Keith Hepp, CFO and vice president of business development for HealthBridge, which serves the Greater Cincinnati tri-state region, likened the arrangement to a utility where communities get their energy source from one power plant.
“Our first mission is to reduce healthcare cost,” he said. “This represents an opportunity to take other communities in with small incremental cost to them and provide huge benefits.”
Hepp said HealthBridge is building critical mass by leveraging its assets and creating a “super RHIO” that will derive incremental revenue and establish greater market power.
The Bloomington area, which encompasses nine counties in south central Indiana, enjoys a 38 percent penetration rate of electronic medical records, or EMRs, among its providers – primarily as a result of receiving a Health Resources and Services Administration grant for rural safety-net providers.
The community of 367,000 didn’t have the economies of scale to develop a robust HIE, especially with 25 different EMR vendors spread among the local providers and no standard interface to connect them.
By collaborating with HealthBridge, the community’s e-Health Collaborative will go live with the clinical messaging system in October and work toward connecting all of its providers by the end of 2008.
The community-based HIE will sustain itself by charging the results senders, said Todd Rowland, MD, of Bloomington Hospital and executive director of the HIE.
e-Health Collaborative will leverage its trusted relationships to bring in more hospitals, physicians, labs and radiology centers. It is also in discussion with key employers for developing “meaningful efforts” such as a disease registry, said Rowland.
CCHIE, which enjoys a strong hospital-physician partnership and joint vision for data exchange, anticipates getting at least 50 percent of its local physicians electronically connected by the end of 2008, said interim executive director Camilla Hull Brown.
With initial funding coming primarily from hospitals, CCHIE will charge physicians a small monthly fee to use the clinical messaging system. The HIE will expand its revenue sources by adding more data centers – labs, radiology and other hospitals – to realize savings by the third year.
Marty Larson, information services director for Community Mercy Health Partners and CCHIE treasurer of the board, said clinicians would see workflow efficiency and quality decision making at the point of care. Brown conservatively estimated that hospitals would see at least $150,000 in ROI per year.
CCHIE’s e-roadmap includes implementing clinical and quality initiatives such as developing a community repository and automated disease reporting.
“We can be creative because we bought the infrastructure,” Brown said.
“Funding can now be used for innovation and not on infrastructure,” agreed Hepp. “If we can rely on a common infrastructure, different communities can create different innovations and in the long term we all benefit.”