Tennessee HIE extends data reach

Shared Health, a public/private health information exchange based in Chattanooga, Tenn., is expanding the sources of data it will make available to clinicians and upgrading its system for sharing clinical information.The organization is partnering with Novo Innovations, a maker of HIE software, to improve its clinical interface capabilities. Shared Health will use Novo’s agent software.Brian Young, clinical product manager at Shared Health, called the addition of Novo’s tool a logical extension of the exchange’s role in “connecting our clinical community in Tennessee and elsewhere to larger institutions or sources of data.”The Novo installation will supply data from integrated delivery networks and health systems to clinical users, particularly physicians affiliated with health systems that use electronic medical records (EMRs), Young said.The Novo agent software resides on the EMR systems at physicians’ offices, while another component runs on a host computer at the health system or integrated delivery network. That software serves as an interface engine. The local software takes data collected by the health system, translates it and inserts it in the EMR system.Shared Health also has a system upgrade in the works, which will launch June 26. The company’s next-generation platform, dubbed Clinical Xchange, will incorporate clinical decision support tools. They include an automated Problem List and a feature called Care Opportunities, which presents a patient’s historical data, flags chronic conditions and identifies potential gaps in care.The tools “are intended to augment and assist the clinician in determining an accurate problem list and quickly assessing potential intervention opportunities,” Young said. He called them “a starting point for a conversation between clinician and patient at the point of care. We believe these tools will provide a material [return on investment] to the clinician in terms of both time and outcomes.”Additional tools slated for release this fall include Condition Tracker and Clinical Insight, which will support analysis of physician-based practice populations and clinical registries, according to Shared Health.The organization created Clinical Xchange in partnership with Allscripts, IBM, Initiate Systems, MEDai, Oracle and Orion Health.