Many of today's patients do not simply visit one physician or medical center to serve all their needs; rather, they consult a variety of specialists and facilities to treat different aspects of their health. For this reason, it is critical that hospitals respond to their demands for more coordinated, safe care by sharing data, not only between clinicians and departments, but beyond its walls to external organizations. At the HIMSS 2008 conference, MEDITECH's Manager of Electronic Health Records Initiatives Barbara Hobbs was on hand to discuss the importance of sharing information between hospitals, clinics, physician offices, and public health reporting agencies. She also shared several successes MEDITECH's had with customers who are now able to exchange important health care information among different entities, including affiliated care providers, insurance companies, and medical suppliers.

Hobbs was joined in the booth by representatives from Forward Advantage, MEDITECH's collaborator in creating the new Data Express product. Designed to mobilize MEDITECH customer data to affiliated physicians' EMRs, Data Express enables patients' data to follow them throughout the continuum of care. With its "one-to-many" solution, Data Express is able to receive HL7 formatted messages from MEDITECH and translate them into a variety of formats accepted by EHR systems. It provides seamless communication between MEDITECH hospitals and physician practices by eliminating the complexities of transferring data to non-MEDITECH EHR systems.

"It is so exciting to see interoperability in action, and working to physicians' and patients' benefit. MEDITECH really is leading the way by providing a variety of solutions to mobilize data," says Darla Rigg, vice president of marketing and product management at Forward Advantage. "And unlike much of what we see and hear in the market today, it's not only a framework or a vision for the future—MEDITECH has successfully deployed interoperability and made it a reality for many care communities."

One of the sites that MEDITECH and Forward Advantage have been working with is South Shore Hospital (Weymouth, MA), which has been LIVE with the Data Express product since October 2007. "At this time, its MEDITECH HCIS is able to deliver Lab, Pathology, Micobiology, Blood Bank, and ITS information to a number of Allscripts EHR physician practices," says Rigg. "Plans are in place to expand their Data Express solution to additional physician practices."

Emanuel Medical Center, Forward Advantage's MAGIC early adopter, is now nearing completion of its go-LIVE with Data Express. Hospital executives as well as physician practices throughout the community have already taken notice of how quickly information is transferred from the hospital to their EHR.

"We needed a solution that would work with our MEDITECH MAGIC HCIS and support the growing demand for HL7 clinical data to be sent to our physician EMRs," says Wendy Burns, chief information officer at Emanuel. "We chose Data Express because it represented a collaborative effort by Forward Advantage and MEDITECH; it was pre-configured to accept MEDITECH data and it's based on the Communication Director Platform, which we have found to be very reliable."