Regional Approach for THQIT in Rural Settings

Project Details -
Completed

The purpose of this project was to determine the need and readiness for health information exchange in central and northeastern Pennsylvania, to select technology to support this exchange, to develop a plan for piloting the system among three pilot organizations, and to begin the roll-out of the system to additional regional hospitals. Geisinger Health System has made a considerable investment in its electronic health record (EHR), including access by non-Geisinger physicians for shared patient records. For this grant, Geisinger introduced the idea of sharing health information with fifty-three hospitals in this mostly rural forty-county area in Pennsylvania, and created a plan to begin a pilot information exchange with two community hospitals. Our project design focused on the completion of a regional gap analysis regarding access to clinical information, and an evaluation of solutions to address the identified gaps. Our chief measure of success was the number of participants providing feedback at each step in our planning process. Our principle findings include a regional assessment of the value of information sharing, as well as their readiness to collaborate. We concluded that an incremental implementation of information sharing is necessary to minimize initial costs and to enable organizations to determine benefits realized to justify on-going expense.