Chicago-based Rush Health said it has successfully deployed phase one of Rush Health Connect, a health information exchange (HIE) solution that will aim to enable providers to share patient information more securely an efficiently.
For the project, Rush Health, a clinically-integrated network of physicians and hospitals that includes more than 1,100 physicians and 300 other clinicians serving the Chicago area, worked with IT solutions and services company Ready Computing to help implement and customize InterSystems HealthShare– the IT platform supporting Rush Health Connect.
Rush Health Connect provides its users with aggregated clinical information, customized patient alerts, and the foundation for more advanced analytics, officials say. More specifically, in order to improve the sharing of health data across the Rush Health network, Rush Health Connect currently aggregates clinical information from two different electronic health record (EHR) systems—Epic and AllScripts— widely in use by Rush Health members.
Rush Health officials say they have future plans to include all of the EHR systems represented in its network, such as eClinicalWorks and athenahealth, as well as to establish connections with other HIEs and interoperability networks. Indeed, Rush Health Connect enables clinicians to view this aggregated patient data within their own existing EHR system, even when it is received from a different EHR, they say.
Rush Health exists in part to help the network’s hospitals and physicians to provide enhanced support for high-utilization patients. As such, Rush Health Connect provides real-time alerts and notifications for physicians and care coordinators. When a patient exists on a care coordination notification list and is admitted or discharged from a Rush Health emergency department or hospital, members of the designated care team will receive an automatic, secure message notifying them of the admission or discharge. What’s more, Rush Health Connect incorporates a real-time clinical analytics foundation based on the significant amount of patient data each day collected by Rush Health.
Officials say that in the next phase of the project, Ready Computing will work with Rush Health to expand data sharing capabilities across more hospitals and physician practices, expand notification abilities by incorporating patient event data from Rush Health payers, and conduct increasingly advanced analytics and reporting.
