Orion Health: Forming the Foundation of KeyHIE

Since its founding in 2005, KeyHIE has sought to provide the right information at the right time to participants, and to foster a culture of information sharing to improve both patient care and provider experience. In 2015, KeyHIE partnered with Orion Health to enable the most robust HIE possible, allowing an overall participant growth of 363 percent.

Orion Health’s solution suite forms the foundation of KeyHIE’s platform and allows flexibility and ease of use for all customers. Software deployed by KeyHIE includes Rhapsody’s on-premises interoperability platform and Orion Health’s direct secure messaging, clinical document viewer, HIE module, and more. KeyHIE leverages this integrated portfolio to meet vital technology requirements.

KeyHIE captures a rich mosaic of data types from multiple sources: ADT, lab, radiology, CCD/CCDAs, discharge summaries, medications, allergies and more. The feeds are large-scale, continuously updated, and frequently streamed in real-time.

KeyHIE’s integration of Orion Health’s Clinical Data Repository platform consolidates and manages this trove of information. In the past fiscal year alone, KeyHIE invoked 148 unique rules to deliver 115,000 notifications and share more than 10 million documents, labs, and ER reports. Orion Health recently helped KeyHIE migrate to Amazon Web Services to take full advantage of cloud capabilities and increased resilience. KeyHIE leverages Orion Health’s vast experience in data integration and interoperability, which permits data exchange on multiple levels:

Varied institutions, including payer-provider links.
Widely different data structures.
Diverse applications such as EHRs and analytics.

KeyHIE regards Orion Health’s open API approach as crucial to handling expanding integration needs driven by population health management and other initiatives. Repository data is exchanged through the KeyHIE-developed Information Delivery Service (IDS) software, and provider view is supported by Orion Health’s Clinical Portal. KeyHIE also utilizes Orion Health’s Communicate module for fast and secure electronic transmission and receipt of protected health information among patients, providers, and organizations. Communicate offers point-to-point encryption and flexible management of multiple document and data formats, and care coordination across independent locations is greatly enhanced.

Positive clinical user experience with all these functions is paramount. KeyHIE strives to accommodate provider needs in its onboarding process, employing RNs as trainers. Kim Chaundy, Senior Director of KeyHIE explains, “Orion Health is a partner in the effort and proactive in ensuring proper connectivity, testing, and issue resolution.” Because healthcare remains an attractive target for cyber criminals, security is a fundamental concern in health information exchange. Joe Fisne, associate chief information officer at Geisinger says that KeyHIE “puts security on the table right up front with our partners. Customer confidence in this area is extremely important, especially for smaller practices.”

A member of the Direct Trust network, Orion Health’s platform has substantial, built-in security and conforms to HITRUST, NIST 800-53, and other standards. Through KeyHIE, participants and patients now see these benefits:

Better care through better information. Fisne illustrates the benefit: “On the same day one hospital went live with us, it obtained previously unavailable patient information that prevented an unnecessary operation and may have saved a life.” Such essential point-of-care decision support can only happen with the kind of scalable infrastructure Orion Health offers.
More powerful analytics. KeyHIE’s ability to feed extensive data to analytics engines is crucial to better outcomes. The organization views the powerful capabilities of the Orion Health platform as positioning it well to perform high-value predictive analytics.
“Future-proofing.” As Chaundy noted, “we constantly need to stay relevant in the market.” She listed multiple trends that she believes the Orion Health platform and technology roadmap will help KeyHIE manage, such as social determinants of health; non-traditional data with a significant influence on understanding population health needs is becoming a major goal. Data management complexity will increase as a result.
Precision medicine. The future promises individualized care informed by genomic and other personal data. KeyHIE is leading the way with projects such as Diabetic Retinopathy.
Business Intelligence. KeyHIE Insights™ provides the necessary tools to help participants with HEDIS measures, predictive analytics, and improved care coordination.
Improved provider efficiency. KeyHIE’s proactive notifications through IDS provide significant resource savings for participants such as home health agencies. By notifying agencies when patients are admitted to an ED or inpatient setting, they can follow up appropriately and not waste staff resources when patients aren’t home. Participants are also able to easily perform medication reviews with information available within KeyHIE.

KeyHIE’s partnership with Orion Health builds upon their foundation as one of the nation’s oldest and largest HIEs, positioning them to better the lives of patients and providers now and in the future.