Melissa Kotrys, AzHeC CEO, joined a panel discussion presentation on the Patient Centered Data Home (PCDH) Initiative at the ONC Annual Meeting in Washington DC on June 2, 2016. Kotrys joined Dick Thompson, CEO of Quality Health Network (QHN) in western Colorado and Teresa Rivera, CEO of the Utah Health Information Network (IUHIN) to discuss the successful pilot initiative on the real-time exchange of patient information for who receive care when they travel outside their “data home.”
The PCDH Initiative was announced at the ONC Annual Meeting and received trade media coverage in Healthcare Dive, Health IT Interoperability, and Healthcare Informatics.
The Patient-Centered Data Home (PCDH) is a cost-effective, scalable method of exchanging patient data among health information exchanges (HIEs). PCDH is based on triggering episode alerts, which notify providers a care event has occurred outside of the patients’ “home” HIE, and confirms the availability and the specific location of the clinical data. This enables providers to initiate a simple query to access real-time information across state and regional lines and the care continuum.
PCDH is an initiative of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) that puts into practice the vision that clinical data should be available whenever and wherever care occurs and “centered” around the patient to improve patient care. In this model, all clinical data becomes part of the comprehensive longitudinal patient record in the HIE where the patient resides,
called the PCDH.
SHIEC members; Arizona Health-e Connection (AzHeC), Quality Health Network (QHN) in western Colorado, and Utah-based(UHIN) have come together to pilot a “patient-centered data home (PCDH)” initiative. This is a cost-effective, scalable method of exchanging patient data among HIEs. PCDH is based on triggering episode alerts, which notify providers a care event has occurred outside of the patients’ “home” HIE, and confirms the availability and the specific location of the clinical data. This enables providers to initiate a simple query to access real-time information across state and regional lines and throughout the care continuum.
SHIEC member HIEs are committed to operationalizing the PCDH vision that clinical data should be available whenever and wherever care occurs, and “centered” around the patient to improve patient care. This concept is being implemented in several pilots, which have addressed and resolved legal/policy issues as well as the technical issues of real-time HIE-to-HIE notifications. In this model, all clinical data becomes part of the comprehensive longitudinal patient record in the patient’s data home, which is the community health information exchange (HIE) where the patient resides.
How it works
Step 1: Zip Code Sharing- A PCDH exchange is set up by HIEs sharing all the zip codes within the geographic boundaries that their HIE serves.
Step 2: Automated Notification- Once a triggering care event occurs an automated notification is sent to the patient’s “home” HIE (PCDH) to determine if there is information available for sharing. If clinical data is available an acknowledgment message confirms the availability and location of the data. For example, an out-of-state patient is admitted to a hospital emergency room. This event triggers an automated sequence: an alert is sent to the hospital’s HIE which is relayed to the patient’s home HIE which responds with a notification that information is available on the patient.
Step 3: Query/Response- The automated notification confirms for providers, from both HIEs, that a simple query will allow them to access the clinical information. In the example above, the hospital care teamphysician can query and pull patient records from the patient’s home HIE. In addition, the patient’s home HIE can query and pull information on the patient’s out-of-state encounter into the patient’s longitudinal record.
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