The federal government has been driving electronic healthcare records adoption and its meaningful use that compels industry participants to comply. There is no single path to compliance, but a Health Information Exchange (HIE) providing services that enable the electronic sharing of health-related information is one way for providers to comply with some of the meaningful use criteria while enabling better public health reporting and coordination of care. Our Client, a new venture supported by dozens of hospitals in a major metropolitan area, analyzed existing HIE’s but determined that coverage and functionality was insufficient. Trexin was engaged to help create a solution roadmap and select a technology platform for what may become one of the largest HIEs in the country.

Approach

Providing subject-matter expertise in healthcare, finance, new product development, and technology, Trexin catalyzed a cross-functional team to create a broad solution roadmap and then orchestrated an extensive vendor solution selection process that evaluated more than a half dozen submissions. Numerous potential services of an HIE were evaluated, including:

• Cross-entity patient linking
• Patient data access & consent management
• Patient record locator
• Summary of care records for patients referred or transitioned to another provider or setting
• Electronic data exchange of clinical information among providers and patient-authorized entities
• Generation and electronic transmission of permissible prescriptions
• Public health reporting (immunization, cancer registry, lab reporting)

Vendors were comparatively evaluated in six categories: technical, functional, financial, business, roadmap, and security/privacy.

Results

Aligned with hospital subscriber focus areas, compliance needs, and budget constraints, a well-structured, cohesive, multi-year solution roadmap was created and subsequently approved by our Client’s advisory board, which also approved the vendor recommendation based on the fitness criteria and evaluation results. Our Client is now proceeding with the implementation, which promises to significantly differentiate itself from its competitors while satisfying important compliance objectives.