CHRISTUS Health Partners With Medicity For 7-State HIE

Medicity, the Salt Lake City-based health information exchange (HIE) solutions provider, announced recently that CHRISTUS Health (Irving, Texas) will roll out Medicity's full technology suite to drive HIE infrastructure development across seven states: Texas, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Georgia, Utah, and New Mexico.

Building on its successful adoption of Medicity's Novo Grid—patented technology that currently enables result and report distribution and EHR integration from CHRISTUS facilities to physician practices—CHRISTUS will expand upon its current bidirectional HIE capabilities to include the deployment of Medicity's ProAccess Community and MediTrust Cloud Services as well as ambulatory order initiation, physician referrals and CCD exchange.

CHRISTUS will begin its phased implementation by extending Grid connectivity to an additional 900 employed and affiliated physicians - whether or not the practice has an EHR system - while promoting adoption and meaningful use of EHRs. CHRISTUS will also focus on automating laboratory and radiology orders across the Grid infrastructure and implementing peer-to-peer referral functionality to create a sophisticated bidirectional health information exchange environment. Enabling the community health record will constitute the third phase of implementation, followed by patient engagement initiatives and extending access to the community health record to long-term care and home health providers.