An Oregon-based hospice and palliative care provider has partnered with a regional health information exchange to improve care coordination for hospice, palliative, and seriously ill patients.
Salem, Ore.-based Willamette Valley Hospice & Palliative Care and Reliance eHealth Collaborative are working with a technology platform from Acclivity Health.
Information is not always able to be shared between doctor's offices, hospitals, and hospice and palliative care providers. This makes it harder to get a patient the care they need in a timely manner.
Willamette Valley Hospice & Palliative Care is based in an area with multiple health systems, making it difficult for hospice and palliative care providers to track when a patient has gone to a hospital, according to a press release from Acclivity. Through this partnership, Reliance's HIE services, delivered via the Acclivity Health Connected Care platform, notifies Willamette Valley Hospice & Palliative Care when a patient goes to an emergency department, hospital, or urgent care environment. This allows for more rapid, effective intervention by the hospice or palliative team on the patient's behalf, helping them advise hospital providers on the patient's condition, end-of-life wishes, and/or how to transition them into appropriate care after discharge. In some cases, the organization can be notified before the admission process is complete, allowing them to intervene and prevent unnecessary admissions.
"We are the eyes and ears of the primary care provider in a patient's home. Therefore, being able to know when and where people have a health issue is really valuable to us. It helps us meet people where they are when they need help to best serve their needs," said Kevin Hohnbaum, business development manager at Willamette Valley Hospice & Palliative Care, in a statement. "We have already seen the benefits of our palliative care program. Through our provider relationships, we've seen a 55 percent decrease in emergency department visits for palliative care patients and an 86 percent decrease in inpatient hospital stays. Most importantly, this partnership gives us the opportunity to better serve our community."
Willamette Valley Hospice & Palliative Care also worked with Acclivity to help them prepare and apply for the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Primary Care First Serious Illness Population program.
Reliance eHealth Collaborative is a health information exchange founded in 2011. It was originally founded in Southern Oregon to solve the problem of sharing data between hospital and community providers in the region. Since its inception, Reliance has grown significantly and today has broad participation from the full range of healthcare settings as well as behavioral health and social service organization throughout Oregon, Northern California and parts of Washington. Reliance offers HIE services to include longitudinal community health record access, HIE integrated electronic referrals access, HISP services, behavioral health data integration and exchange and data analytic services.
