Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) and Great Lakes Health Connect (GLHC), the leading health information exchange in Michigan, have announced plans to merge by the end of 2019.
MiHIN is a public and private nonprofit collaboration created to coordinate and build the bridges between healthcare providers throughout Michigan. It creates the technology and resources needed to allow for the safe and secure sharing of electronic health information statewide, helping to reduce costs and ultimately improve care for patients. GLHC is a nonprofit HIE organization based in Grand Rapids.
“This strategic integration stays true to both organizations’ missions to continuously improve healthcare quality, efficiency and patient safety by promoting secure, electronic exchange of health information with the best available technology,” said Tim Pletcher, executive director of MiHIN, in a prepared statement. “Both of our organizations have helped establish Michigan as a national leader in interoperability, and now we have the opportunity to work together on future innovations in this field.”
“We have watched each organization succeed on its own, but there comes a time when you have to reflect and examine why we’re working independently on the same mission. We asked ourselves, ‘Would we be stronger together?’ The answer was undoubtedly yes,” said Doug Dietzman, CEO of GLHC, in a statement.
“As individual entities, MiHIN and GLHC have served a vast majority of the state; in some ways together, and in other ways independently. By uniting, we can deepen our impact, and will be more strategically aligned for ongoing national efforts and regulations being announced, such as the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA),” said Pletcher.
There will not be any GLHC or MiHIN staff eliminations as a result of this integration. MiHIN anticipates needing an additional 36 employees over the next year. The current Grand Rapids GLHC office will be maintained, along with MiHIN’s offices in East Lansing and Ann Arbor. MiHIN does not expect physical relocation of staff as a result of the integration.
A MiHIN spokesperson said that Pletcher will continue to lead the MiHIN Group (MiHIN, Velatura, Interoperability Institute) at large. Dietzman will continue working with and supporting the GLHC business as it transitions into the new integrated operational model. In addition, he will become a key executive helping to lead the organization’s effort to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under TEFCA.
MiHIN has continued to expand the services it offers statewide, including the creation of a sandbox environment to enable healthcare organizations to simulate and test interoperability scenarios and a recently announced partnership with Care Convene, a telehealth platform.
In a recent interview, Pletcher described the organization’s approach as a “use case factory.” MiHIN has created a methodology to work on bringing new use cases such as admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) notifications into production and add to their portfolio of shared services. “We put the use cases through a pipeline, including working with the state government or commercial payers to align financial or policy incentives. We have had payers involved in every single use case we have,” he stressed.
Here is an example of some of the recent work GLHC has helped lead: With a State Innovation Model (SIM) grant, the Greater Flint Health Coalition in Flint, Mich., has worked to better meet the needs of people who were showing up regularly in the city’s hospital emergency rooms. Great Lakes Health Connect helped the coalition deploy a closed-loop referral software system to connect healthcare providers and social service agencies.
The SIM effort has led to a 15 percent reduction, since Nov. 2017, in emergency department utilization by the target population. In an interview, Dietzman said his organization partnered with the coalition to help identify who “super-utilizers” of the emergency department were, since it had data from the three main hospitals. “More importantly, once they were identified, we had to coordinate how transitions of care would take place from the provider to a community hub that was created for SIM, then down through specialty hubs dealing with either substance use issues, behavioral health issues, or other social needs folks had related to water, transportation or other things,” he explained. Great Lakes Health Connect worked with the coalition to build the coordination platform using CollaborNet Referrals from Atlanta-based startup Holon Solutions. “So we are doing end-to-end, closed-loop communication and management of those transitions for all those patients in Flint,” he added.
