South Shore Hospital Goes LIVE with CHAPS Project
(3/26/2007)

Last month, we told you about a presentation that MEDITECH gave in conjunction with South Shore Hospital (Weymouth, MA) about the Community Hospitals and Physician Practice Systems (CHAPS) project. We're happy to report that on March 5th, the first pilot phase of CHAPS went LIVE on its scheduled date.

"A few years ago, you would have never heard of a hospital, physician offices, and software vendors coming together to meet the needs of a patient community in this manner," says John Hoar, IS director at South Shore. "We're all proud to be part of this initiative."

CHAPS is a leading example of the federated-decentralized model for data sharing, and the entities involved are early adopters of emerging industry standards. South Shore Hospital and Atrius Health, an alliance of five community medical groups serving approximately 600,000 patients in eastern Massachusetts, are maintaining their own health records for patients and exchanging clinical data cross-platform as needed.

When a patient registers in the South Shore Hospital Emergency Department (ED), a patient identification query is triggered. If a positive patient identification match is confirmed, a standardized Medical Summary Document is retrieved from the physician office system. Notification of the document's availability is presented on the ED Tracker, and the document is presented to the ED physician. After acknowledging receipt of the document, the ED physician then imports it into the South Shore Hospital Electronic Medical Record (EMR). This process triggers an immediate registration notification transaction to the physician office system, and allows for subsequent discharge notifications, as well as a push of the ED discharge summary to the physician office system. All documents are available in both the MEDITECH system and the physician office system, and can be viewed within their native EMRs.

This is the first phase of a multi-phase project, and is designed to be scalable, allowing for seamless adoption by other parties. "From a technical perspective, this is a cutting-edge project," says Phil Businger, interoperability manager at MEDITECH, who headed up the technical team. "It's very exciting to see this level of clinical data shared in a LIVE environment between two disparate systems. This project is different than anything I've done in my 10 years at MEDITECH, and I've learned a lot."

 

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