Vermont HIE Expands Encounter Notifications to Include Home Health Agencies

Since April 2016, Vermont Information Technology Leaders, Inc. (VITL) has been providing admission, discharge, and transfer messages from all of Vermont’s hospitals using existing connections to the Vermont Health Information Exchange (VHIE). In partnership with messaging vendor PatientPing, VITL has expanded that effort to include home health agency patient encounter notifications.

Since April, VITL has used these messages to deliver an average of 8,000 notifications per month directly to providers around the state.

Now the hospital messages will be augmented by encounter messages from five visiting nurse associations in Vermont. The contributing home health agencies are: Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice, Franklin County Home Health Agency, VNA & Hospice of the Southwest Region / Rutland Area VNA & Hospice, Visiting Nurse and Hospice for Vermont and New Hampshire, and Visiting Nurse Association of Chittenden and Grand Isle Counties.

 “Health care is moving away from fee-for-service payments toward value-based payment models. These models, like the proposed Vermont All-Payer Model, are ushering in an era when coordinated care will be more important than ever,” said John Evans, VITL’s president and CEO, in a prepared statement. “We recognize the important role of home health in patient care and using the VHIE to get these notifications out there just made sense.”

Agencies and other admitting facilities that contribute data to generate notifications can utilize a free dashboard to track patients’ affiliations with community providers and prior encounter histories. Additionally, a subscription service is available that allows providers to receive notifications whenever a patient has been admitted or discharged from another PatientPing facility, including all VHIE-connected sites.

Boston-based PatientPing recently announced that it had received $31.6 million in Series B funding led by Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz and Boston-based Leerink Transformation Partners. The funding will be used to fuel the company’s expansion into new geographies and accelerate the development of product enhancements. PatientPing also plans to at least double the size of its staff. This announcement came a little more than a year after the company announced $9.6 million in seed and series A funding, bringing the total funding amount to $41.2 million to date.