The Michigan Health Information Shared Services Network (MiHIN) is working with several stakeholders on a pilot project aimed at improving patient care coordination between emergency medical services (EMS) agencies and receiving hospitals. The goal is to implement the service statewide.
MiHIN is Michigan’s state-designated nonprofit health information exchange, providing patient information to physicians, clinics, federally qualified health centers, hospitals, pharmacies, health insurance providers, and public health in Michigan.
As MiHIN points out, many of America’s hospital systems and the fire and ambulance services that serve the communities around them operate in information silos, either not exchanging data in real time or doing so in formats that cannot be used by electronic medical records or health information exchanges.
In a recent interview with Innovation in health care, Jaki Porter, MiHIN’s COO, described the partnership with Beyond Lucid Technologies and the pilot project with Reading Emergency Unit and Hillsdale Hospital. The goal is to have seamless communication between ambulances and hospitals to eliminate delays and expedite patient transfers.
Today, he said, most of the information EMS personnel gather is delivered when the patient arrives at the hospital. Sometimes it’s written down, sometimes it’s conveyed verbally. Many times it’s not communicated so the hospital can prepare before the patient arrives.
In order for the process to go digital, most hospitals require a continuity of care document (CCD), but the information coming out of the EMS system is currently not in CCD format, so hospitals can’t process it. Beyond Lucid is taking that information and converting it into a CCD, and MiHIN is working closely with them to make sure there’s no missing data, it’s in the right places, and it makes sense to emergency department physicians, Porter said. “Now that we can actually convert it into CCD format, we can send it to the hospital to prepare for the patient to arrive. They can actually see what’s going on with the patient and pull any historical information through our network, so they can know what other medications the patient might be taking,” he explained.
Additionally, he said, EMS workers would like to be able to improve the care they receive by knowing the final diagnosis. That will help them know if they treated the patient correctly. With this new partnership, they will be able to look at a very limited data set to understand what the final diagnosis was.
Messages are already flowing between Reading Emergency Unit and Hillsdale. Hillsdale is working with its EHR vendor to resolve some issues in reading messages. The second phase, which involves closing the loop and sending information back to EMS crews, is now underway.
The goal is to roll it out statewide at some point. “We already have a second center that’s interested in participating,” Porter said. “The first step, of course, is trying to figure out which hospitals are open to it. Most of them typically are — any data they can get to be able to prepare, they’re typically ready to do that. But just getting them to invest the time to make sure their EMR can receive the data and that it’s readable is the second step.”
Several other groups, such as the State of Michigan and some of the payers, are interested in making sure that data actually gets where it needs to go, Porter said, adding that this could also help EMS submit their claims directly to insurance, which today is typically a more manual or faxed process.
Porter said Beyond Lucid has worked with several other places across the country to start these conversations, “but I think this is their first pilot project to actually get the data and get it where it needs to go.”
