Oklahoma HIE exemplifies benefits of making patient data easily accessible

The MyHealth Access Network uses governance and real-time data transmission to bring healthcare info to clinicians.


HIEs are proving value by enabling information exchange among players in the healthcare industry.

Significant progress has been made in and with Health Information Exchange systems during the past decade.

While limitations and struggles persist, certain entities — such as Oklahoma’s MyHealth Access Network (MyHealth) — are demonstrating potential benefits that initiatives can produce.

In a presentation in the HDM KLASroom, Lisa Bari, chief executive officer at Civitas Networks for Health, and David Kendrick, MD, chief executive officer at MyHealth Access Network, discussed how MyHealth has become a pioneer in HIE success through effective governance and new data exchange applications.

The rise of HIE

As more provider organizations have embraced value-based care and taken on risk in providing patient care, HIE adoption has risen organically but not equally.

Despite this, Kendrick said he believes that HIEs “are one of the most dramatic success stories in grassroots governance this country seen in a long time” because of how different stakeholders have come together, represented their parties well and built the trust necessary to exchange critical data.

“People look at what we're doing as providing a technology,” Kendrick contended. “But every bit as much or more important in building trust with people is transparent governance.

“The board of MyHealth, which was formed in 2010, really came out of a community planning effort,” he continued. “We adopted the principle that our governance body would be focused on the perspectives of three groups – those who receive care and services, those who deliver care and services, and those who pay for care and services.”

Bari said she believes that the COVID pandemic has forced public health leaders to coordinate more effectively with those who deliver care, enabling HIEs to demonstrate their value.

“Our HIE member organizations have really been key in getting data to where it needs to go to quickly, and in standing up dashboards, solutions and data feeds,” she noted. “Those things help get the data to the right people, and combine and enhance clinical and public health data.”

Support during the pandemic

"MyHealth used patient-centered data to make an incredible impact during the COVID crisis," Kendrick said. “We've participated as the bridging organization in the Accountable Health Communities Model for CMMI,” he explained.

“In that model, we offered social needs screenings to 2.6 million people in Oklahoma – most of that during the COVID window – and have been able to address almost half a million social needs by connecting people directly with food, pantries and housing services, and other services across the state.”

"MyHealth’s most exciting effort may be their Patient Centered Data Home™ (PCDH) initiative," Kendrick contended. “With the way our model was devised, if a patient from another part of the country comes into Oklahoma and is admitted to any hospital, emergency room or clinic, that data is available within about a minute in the local HIE. That's about how long it takes to transmit a registration.”

Kendrick explained that the PCDH proactively alerts a patient’s providers and enables real-time responses. “If I’m the patient’s doctor back home, the PCDH tells me this patient was admitted in this place one minute ago. And if I need to follow up on a records query and provide records to the place where the patient is being seen, I can do that.”

“The PCDH is unique because we are proactively pushing the data where it needs to go,” Bari said. “There are other national networks and frameworks that are pulling and allowing queries and responses, which is a really important effort. But the PCDH makes sure that the data truly follows that patient.”

MyHealth is in the process of upgrading and expanding the PCDH to make it more accessible to providers, payors and other stakeholders. In the meantime, Bari and Kendrick agreed that healthcare organizations should invest in the future by connecting to their regional or state HIE.

“Even in a provider system, state or region with an overwhelming instance of one type of EHR, there still are plenty of things that fall outside of an EHR,” Bari said. “You don't know what you don't know, and it's important for HIE organizations to be able to quantify that and help folks understand what they're missing — what data they could access to really have a comprehensive view of patient care.”

“HIEs are like the power grid or the interstate highway system, and the use cases are innumerable,” Kendrick concluded. “Each given leader of an organization charting their strategic pathway forward has slightly different needs. But whether you're a trucking company or in a sports car, you’ve still got to use the same road.”

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