Health Information Exchange (HIE)

Here are some of the main use cases and benefits of an HIE:

• Allows for organisation-based sharing between strategic partners that share care pathways to help join up care.
• Provides care professionals the ability to view aggregated, citizen-centric information embedded within EHR systems, avoiding the need for separate logins or a secure web portal for care professionals without an EHR.
• Helps care professionals provide the best patient care possible by reducing gaps and errors in patient history.
• Helps emergency care professionals to provide safe care for patients admitted to A&E with health issues that are unknown to the hospital.
• Saving patient lives in A&E when presented with life threatening conditions and where the health history is paramount to making the right treatment decisions – clients can provide case studies where they believe this has happened.
• Reducing admissions to hospital through A&E as the external medical history and context can help the care provider to assess risk and make better decisions on whether to admit – some admissions are made based on uncertainty around underlying condition stability.
• Reduces redundant ordering of tests such as radiographs and laboratory tests as results are available from tests carried out in all connected locations. This reduces costs, is better for patient and reduces iatrogenic injury that can be caused from tests.
• Use by outpatient care professionals to speed time to treatment plans. Without access to this rich and more complete information, it can take many outpatient visits to start or adjust treatment plans. For example, the patient on first visit may have high blood pressure but may be unaware of what medications they are on necessitating a second visit, and maybe more before treatments are adjusted.
• Use in an inpatient assessment to speed up discharge through understanding the wider set of health and care issues that a patient may have and what needs to be organised for supportive discharge from hospital.
• Use in primary care by GPs and others to look up results from hospitals and test centre in order to give patients more timely feedback on results. It will also reassure patients more quickly that they don’t need to worry, and accelerate care for patients that need further investigation or intervention.

Cerner is working with several supplier partners to make data accessible across the healthcare economy. Currently, Cerner HIE can access datasets from Healthcare Gateway’s MIG, directly from EMIS, directly from Servelec RiO, directly from AzeusCare and will shortly release a direct link with TPP SystmOne. This list is not exhaustive and other direct links will become progressively available.

Cerner works with its supplier partners to provide access to the Cerner HIE as a contextual link within the application rather than through a secondary login to encourage clinical adoption. The contextual link is available from: EMIS Web, INPS, Servelec RiO, AzeusCare and TPP SystmOne. This is not an exhaustive list and new suppliers and their solutions will become progressively available.

Yes, Cerner HIE is vendor agnostic, 80 percent of our Cerner HIE connections are to non-Cerner EHRs. Our Cerner HIE technology does not rely on our Cerner Millennium® EHR technology and is a separate technology stack and solution. As an example, Cerner has implemented our HIE for Tanner Health and Northeast Georgia Health System. Neither of these clients have implemented our EHR.

The Cerner HIE has a flexible data model. Three permanent models for data governance exist today and are fully supported by our HIE: centralised, federated and hybrid. In all three governance models, health care organisations’ internal policies for data sharing and enterprise security are taken into account during implementation to ensure the data gets stored, secured, exchanged and managed appropriately.