The Inland Empire Health Information Exchange (IEHIE), a self-funded collaborative of Riverside and San Bernardino County hospitals, medical centers, physician practices, health plans, public health organizations and other healthcare providers, will use Orion Health for its patient health records and care coordination tools, aimed at serving more than 4.1 million people.
IEHIE is one of the country’s largest health information exchanges. It was founded in 2010 and is fully self-funded through a collaboration that currently includes 48 participating healthcare organizations in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties.
“It is Inland Empire HIE’s goal to become one of the country’s most successful, self-sustaining HIEs,” Richard Swafford, executive director, IEHIE, said in a statement. “We believe that the collaborative manner in which key stakeholders in the region have worked to create buy-in, a technology vision, a sustainable funding structure and a strategic plan for long-term growth offers a model that other HIE communities and provider organizations can learn from as they develop their own information exchanges.”
The fully implemented HIE will have a phased program rollout, starting with an initial pilot program that includes tracking of clinical quality measures for diabetes. Orion will aim to help IEHIE get participating providers to engage in automatic reporting of immunizations, electronic labs and syndromic surveillance data required for public health reporting and achieving Meaningful Use. Later in 2012, IEHIE will offer Image Viewer and EMR Lite to participating physicians and will expand population health management programs across the region.
The 48 organizations currently involved in IEHIE include 21 hospitals, 21 medical groups, the two local medical associations, the hospital association, both County Public Health Departments and Clinics, and Inland Empire Health Plan, a not-for-profit public health plan serving more than 530,000 low-income members. Fourteen organizations, supporting 2,500 hospital beds, 800 physicians and over 1 million patients in the region, have enrolled in IEHIE’s pilot program that will go live in April 2012.
