Jim YounkinIf KeyHIE is granted funding, the project will begin in February and connect up to 60 sites in Pennsylvania. KeyHIE also plans to publish a tool kit that other long-term/home health centers can download to start exchanging data.Coordinating COPD, CHS Patients through the Keystone Beacon CommunityNot only has Younkin and his team been hard at work with the long-term care facility project, but they have also been simultaneously working on initiatives stemming from the Beacon Community grant and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) grant. The Keystone Beacon Community Grant, which began in April 2010, is focusing on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and congestive heart failure (CHS) patient care coordination. “COPD and CHS are [diseases] that by deploying case managers to help coordinate their care,” Younkin says, “we can show a significant improvement in their number of admissions and readmissions and reduce those.”KeyHIE will structure care coordination for these chronic diseases in a three-tiered model. The first piece is the inpatient component, which is a module embedded in the hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) that makes sure COPD and CHS patients get proper follow-up care. The module has reminders for a phone call check-up and a post-discharge medication reconciliation. The second tier involves case management from about 20 to 25 ambulatory case managers who will embed into physician practices starting this March 2011. “We can send a real-time alert through the health exchange to the care manager and/or to the patient’s primary care physician to notify them when the patient is in the hospital,” says Younkin. The messages will be transmitted to either a physician portal or through the facility’s EHR. Those patients who don’t have a designated care manager can contact a designated call center, the third facet of this model, that will help patients to transition from acute care.Currently, Geisinger with the help of the United Kingdom-based GE Healthcare is working on development of portals for both providers and patients. Later this summer, patients will be able to log into a portal to manage their own health information in a personal health record format that will allow them to publish information to KeyHIE to make available to clinicians. Patients will also have the ability to view and download information like their discharge summaries. Community engagement and user testing will be kicking off in the next two months.AHRQ Grant and BeyondWhile the Beacon grant focuses on care coordination in a five-county area, the AHRQ grant covers a much wider swath, 31 counties, and engages long-term care and home health, as well as hospitals and primary care physicians. KeyHIE is beginning to provide information like discharge summaries and lab results and will start publishing CCDs in April. This year, KeyHIE will be bringing on the three-hospital Susquehanna Health System in Williamsport. Another project of the AHRQ grant scheduled for 2012 is to allow emergency responders to access patient information from an accident scene via KeyHIE and to electronically provide trip reports to emergency department staff. Younkin, who says early discussions are promising, adds that EMTs are well positioned to use HIE in controlled way, allowing them to see a snapshot of patient, rather than same level of access as physicians do.Beyond grant funding and a subscription model for exchange services, Younkin sees payers key into KeyHIE’s long-term sustainability. “Often times these payers use case managers to help coordinate care in physician practices and certainly they’d benefit from having access to health information exchange to track where the patients are going for their care and all the information they need to manage those patients,” he says. Getting payers involved could be a boon for physicians too, he says, as they could share medication history to clinicians through the HIE.
