One of the most valuable services health information exchanges are providing involves the acronym ADT, which stands for “admission, discharge and transfer” summaries. Providing physicians information when their patients have significant hospital events allows for faster follow-up care. A big first for HIEs is now taking place on the Delmarva Peninsula with ADT summaries being shared across state lines.
The Delaware Health Information Network (DHIN) and Maryland’s CRISP (the Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients) are now exchanging ADT summaries.
According to an item on the DHIN web site, Delaware residents who are patients at three hospital systems in Maryland — Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the University of Maryland Medical System hospitals on the Eastern Shore and Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury — will have ADT summaries sent to their doctors in Delaware. The remaining 41 Maryland hospitals will be added to the system in the coming months.
Notifications for Maryland residents who are admitted, discharged or transferred from any Delaware hospital are being delivered through the Maryland exchange and are available to their Maryland-based physicians.
“This is an important first step in what will become a full state-to-state exchange of hospital event information that will ultimately benefit patients of both states,” said DHIN CEO Dr. Jan Lee, in a prepared statement.
Both DHIN and CRISP are among the most advanced statewide HIEs in the country. In 2007 DHIN became the first live, statewide health information network in the nation. It serves 100% of Delaware’s acute care hospitals, and more than 14 million clinical result and report deliveries are made through DHIN each year – and the total patient records in the system now exceed 1,700,000, featuring patient records from all 50 states.
In 2011, the Maryland Health Care Commission required all hospitals in the state to connect with CRISP and send ADT data, making it the first HIE in the nation to connect all acute-care hospitals in a state. CRISP has also worked to connect many other providers to the HIE.
Soon the ADT information will be channeled to the Encounter Notification System (ENS) that is offered by both states to their participating providers. The alerts generated by ENS, which indicate in real-time that a patient has been admitted, discharged or transferred from a hospital, help to streamline the coordination of care among care management teams.
