Rural HIE Live in Louisiana

HDM Breaking News, April 3, 2008

Seven of 24 participating rural hospitals in northern Louisiana have gone live on the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange.

The HIE is designed to support teleconsultations between physicians and patients at rural hospitals and specialists at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. The HIE is an initiative of the Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition, a trade association for the state’s 41 rural hospitals.

The HIE expects over the next two years to link with all 24 participating hospitals in the northern part of the state. But by May, all 24 facilities will have telemedicine systems implemented to conduct teleconsultations with University Health Sciences Center. As the hospitals become live on the HIE, patient records and other supporting documentation will be electronically transmitted to specialists. Hospitals not live on the HIE will fax or ship via overnight carrier the information in preparation for a teleconsultation.

Information technology vendor CA, based in Islandia, N.Y., is the prime contractor for the HIE. CA also is supplying software to support user authentication, single-sign-on, role-based access, identity federation and access auditing.

Carefx Corp., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp. are supplying the platform for the HIE. IBM’s Websphere technology provides the portal framework. CareFx’s Fusion software pulls pertinent data from disparate information systems and reformats it for viewing in a Web browser. The HIE also is using enterprise master patient index software from Initiate Systems Inc., Chicago.

More information is available at larhc.org.

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