MEDITECH and South Shore Hospital Present Interoperability Case Study
(2/08/2007)

On February 2nd, MEDITECH and South Shore Hospital (Weymouth, MA) teamed to present an overview of a secure clinical data exchange system to allow hospitals and physician offices to share vital patient health data.

Titled "Advancing the Future of Health Care Delivery through Electronic Health Records," the presentation was delivered at the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium's 2007 Healthcare Information Technology Conference, in Burlington, MA. Barbara Hobbs, manager, EHR and interoperability initiatives, MEDITECH; Daniel MacNeil, director of development coordination information systems, South Shore Hospital; and Phil Businger, interoperability Manager, MEDITECH, spoke about the Community Hospitals and Physician Practice Systems (CHAPS) initiative that began in 2006 and is scheduled to go LIVE in March.

CHAPS is an example of a federated-decentralized Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) model in which South Shore Hospital and participating physician offices will maintain their own EMR health records for patients and exchange clinical data cross-platform as needed. Physicians treating patients in South Shore Hospital's Emergency Department can now view on-line External Medical Summaries available from the physicians' offices for the patients they are treating, and primary care physicians will receive discharge summaries following the treatments their patients receive in the South Shore Hospital E.D. This is the first phase of a multi-phase project, and is designed to be scalable, allowing for seamless adoption by other parties.

"We agreed to pilot the system in our hospital because our track record of early I.T. adoption has truly expedited our delivery of quality care," says MacNeil. "We are pleased to play a leadership role in improving access to vital information that will benefit patients, providers, and the community."

Hobbs spoke of the effort to get the project off the ground, the challenges involved in getting multiple stakeholders to adopt the technology, and the reasons behind some of the infrastructure decisions, including the decision to use federal Health Information Exchange (HIE) standards. MacNeil followed with an overview of the implementation and a demonstration of the pilot system in place at South Shore, and Businger concluded with a review of the technical considerations.

"We tried to show the obstacles that all of the participants face in a project like this, and how we overcame them," says Hobbs. "As these initiatives emerge and develop, the collective input of all the stakeholders and their ability to collaborate is crucial to the project's success."

MEDITECH
Medical Information Technology, Inc.
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Westwood, MA 02090
781-821-3000
www.meditech.com