Page 21 - Del-Medical-Journal-June-2015-Final.indd
P. 21
GUEST EDITORIAL
An independent review by health information exchange (HIE) evaluator Maestro Strategies monetizes this value, calculating that DHIN:
■ Saved data senders nearly $7 million delivering results to enrolled practices in 2013 alone.
■ Saved enrolled practices a collective $885,000 in electronic health record interface implementation.
■ Saves insurance companies and consumers $10 million annually in the reduction of duplicate radiology and lab tests.
today’s “waste not, want not” health care environment. A recent study in Health Data Management found that the use of an HIE cut redundant tests by 25 percent in just 90 days! (What a help an HIE would have been to this physician, stationed at an overseas base, searching after-hours for test results in a chart locked in another doctor’s desk!)
As the nation’s most mature statewide health information exchange, DHIN is proud to serve all of Delaware’s acute care hospitals and long-term care and skilled nursing facilities, and nearly 100 percent of ordering medical providers.
With more than 14,000,000 clinical results and reports posted on DHIN each year, the total unique patient records in the system now exceed 1.9 million and hail from all 50 states.
This track record of success has positioned DHIN as a national leader in health information exchanges — one of only a few public HIEs proven to be fully sustaining (Stage 6 of seven on the eHealth Initiative HIE Maturity Model) and now innovating to provide value-added services (Stage 7 on the HIE Maturity Model).
and library — storing medical results and information in the Community Health Record, DHIN is evolving into an ecosystem, focused on the collective good.
Specifically, DHIN exists to: Create, operate, and maintain a health information ecosystem for the greater social good in which all participants both contribute and receive value.
In this always evolving and improving ecosystem, data and improved access to data will continue to be the currency for
DHIN has created value for the thousands of medical professionals who access the Community Health Record each day. www.dhin.org
health care’s stakeholders. Soon, enrolled physicians and other medical professionals will have access to aggregated data at
the cohort level — something that was previously too time and labor-intensive to compile — to use for population analysis
and predictive modeling. By identifying patients who are at
the greatest risk and allowing their medical teams to be more proactive, we will see a reduction in costly hospital readmissions and lapses in care.
ecosystem, as DHIN will help connect them with their medical information and provide convenient ways for them to communicate safely and securely with their medical team.
And for society, DHIN’s health information ecosystem will continue to provide perhaps the greatest value of all: Facilitating better communication to achieve better health outcomes for Delawareans.
AUTHOR
■ JAN LEE, MD is CEO of Delaware Health Information Network. She is a board-certified Family Practice Physician with a Master’s degree in Medical Management and previously held leadership roles with the United States Air Force, most recently leading implementation of the Department of Defense electronic health record.
Del Med J | June 2015 | Vol. 87 | No. 6
181
