Altera Digital Health has formed a strategic partnership with Health Gorilla, a national interoperability platform, enabling electronic health record customers to securely exchange health data across the healthcare ecosystem under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement.
"Our work with Health Gorilla is a direct investment in reducing friction, surfacing meaningful data and giving providers the tools they need to make clinical decisions with confidence," said Jay Adams, Altera's executive vice president of its Sunrise EHR platform.
WHY IT MATTERS
Altera said on Tuesday that it will integrate Health Gorilla’s national real-time interoperability network, which is a TEFCA Qualified Health Information Network, into its EHR platform for midsize hospitals and health systems.
Health Gorilla uses artificial intelligence to surface relevant patient information. The collaboration gives Altera a platform for seamless data exchange across customers' care settings, giving clinicians at the point of care access to real-time patient data.
Also exchanging data through Health Gorilla are MEDITECH, Medhost, Resmed and Canvas Medical EHRs.
With access to longitudinal patient records, including labs, medications and information on social determinants of health, directly within their existing EHR workflows, Altera's customer providers can access patient data faster without the need to manually access outside portals and systems.
"This partnership is about clearing a path to better care," Adams said in the announcement. "It’s not just about interoperability for its own sake – it’s about removing the barriers that slow clinicians down."
THE LARGER TREND
With health information often scattered across provider EHRs and other data systems, providers are pressed to get a more complete picture of a patient's health and social determinants to improve their individual care as well as overall health outcomes at their organization.
But the additional administrative work adds to provider burnout and imposes costs and could result in care delays for patients.
Bob Watson, Health Gorilla's CEO, told Healthcare IT News in April that the company's secure health data sharing platform has shrunk the time it takes for providers to access patient data as a TEFCA QHIN.
"Historically, this process could take hours or even days, involving phone calls, faxes and manual data entry," he said. "With our QHIN, we're seeing a significant decrease in this time, often bringing retrieval down to minutes, or even seconds. This translates directly to faster decision-making and improved patient care."
ON THE RECORD
"Providers still struggle with fragmented data that slows down care and burdens decision-making," Watson said in a statement. "By embedding our QHIN-enabled connectivity into the Sunrise EHR, Altera is taking a significant step toward making comprehensive health data securely available at the point of care – supporting faster, more accurate decisions and better-coordinated outcomes."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
