“I advocate an exchange that facilitates enhanced patient care and works seamlessly in the medical environment. The last thing physicians need is another technological hassle.”
“By more efficiently managing these essential services at the state level, the state’s network of regional HIEs can con- tinue to be guided locally while avoid- ing costs and incompatibilities resulting from the development of separate strate- gies to cover core services they all need,” Mr. Gilman said. Dr. Hoxhaj is chief medical adviser
patient’s health — medications they’re taking, allergies they have, scans they’ve received — while reducing cost and improving quality. The exchanges will greatly benefit physicians and their pa- tients, especially once they’re interoper- able,” he said.
While local HIEs are in various stages of development, the future of HIEs in Texas looks bright. Texas Health Services Authority (THSA) is administering HIE- Texas, a network of shared services that facilitates interoperability. THSA, un- der contract with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), oversees the development and imple- mentation of HIEs in Texas. THSA Chief Executive Officer Tony Gilman expects four Texas HIEs to connect to HIETexas in the first half of the year. He says HIE- Texas planned in December to connect to the National eHealth Exchange, which provides local HIEs with a link to federal agencies’ health information networks and HIEs in other states. THSA contracts with Massachusetts-
based InterSystems Corporation to help the organization develop HIETexas’ shared services. This year, THSA plans to introduce
40 TEXAS MEDICINE February 2014
these four state-level shared services through HIETexas:
1. Patient consent management allows HIEs requesting patient information from other HIEs to quickly and easily determine whether the appropriate patient consent has been granted.
2. Clinical document exchange provides a secure network health profession- als can use to retrieve specific patient data stored outside their HIE.
3. The gateway to the National eHealth Exchange is a secured network of HIEs and other health care organiza- tions from other states and federal agencies that allows document ex- change to and from these entities.
4. The federated trust framework helps ensure information exchanged among HIEs is secure and confidential.
HIETexas plans to eventually offer local HIEs access to state data sources, such as the state’s online prescription drug monitoring program known as Pre- scription Access in Texas, Texas Medicaid, and public health data repositories main- tained by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS).
for Greater Houston Healthconnect, an HIE serving 20 counties that planned to connect to HIETexas last month. He is a liaison between the medical and health information technology industries. “I provide a physician’s perspective of how we expect the exchange to function. I advocate an exchange that facilitates enhanced patient care and works seam- lessly in the medical environment. The last thing physicians need is another technological hassle,” said Dr. Hoxhaj, director of the Harris Health Ben Taub General Hospital Emergency Center. For the most part, electronic patient information has resided in separate si- los of hospital and physician practice electronic health record (EHR) systems. Dr. Hoxhaj says that HIETexas makes it possible to accomplish the ultimate goal of EHRs sharing data with one another, allowing multiple physicians at the lo- cal, state, and national levels to access patient information. He describes Greater Houston Health- connect as “user friendly” and says the HIE continues to ramp up operations and recruit participants. The HIE had 23 hospitals and about 4,000 physician us- ers at press time.
“The HIE’s community health record shows me the clinics, hospitals, and physicians the patient has seen, as well as testing and labs that have been done. The HIE will become an even more use- ful tool as more hospitals, labs, clinics, and practices participate,” he said.
Funding winds down Developing HIE infrastructure in Texas has rapidly gained traction due to $28 million in federal Health Information Technology for Economic and Clini- cal Health (HITECH) Act funding. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) allocated $548 million of HITECH funds
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