The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), the not-for-profit organization which is aiming to implement the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), haschosen the Fishkill, N.Y.-based MedAllies to operate a “Direct Solution.” The solution, similar to a secure email function, would allow healthcare providers to seamlessly send data from one provider directly to another who is caring for the same patient.
“Direct creates a round-trip referral, which is incredibly important to high-quality care. It sufficiently and effortlessly gets the patient and their information to the specialist physician and then gets the information back to the primary care physician, once the specialist has consulted on the patient,” Ferdinand J. Venditti, Jr, M.D., vice dean for clinical affairs at Albany Medical College, said in a statement. “This is the holy grail of consultative medicine. This is a home run.”
The Direct Solution is one of three services that will be offered statewide via the SHIN-NY. The others are patient record look-up and alerts. Patient record look-up functions like a secure search engine, allowing only those healthcare providers a patient has consented for to access their health information. Alerts allows providers to subscribe to a function that alerts them when data is posted about their patients.
