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Doylestown Hospital serves as a community HIE model

By Patty Enrado , Special Projects Editor

Doylestown Hospital near Philadelphia has launched the next phase of its health IT connectivity initiative to share information with community physicians.


The work illustrates that the 208-bed hospital is not resting on its laurels after having received the 2010 Microsoft Health Users Group (MS-HUG) Innovation Award for Best Use of HIE and Interoperability and achieving HIMSS Analytics Stage 6 for electronic health record use in March.


The journey toward interoperability began with the understanding that 70 percent of care occurs outside of the hospital, said CIO Rick Lang. In order to help community physicians provide quality of care, Doylestown Hospital developed a strategy around the seamless transfer of care data.


The hospital, which serves the northern suburban communities of Philadelphia, including Bucks and Montgomery Counties in Pennsylvania and Hunterdon and Mercer Counties in New Jersey, enabled community physicians to connect to its NextGen Practice Management system. Both its practice management and EHR systems are from Horsham, Pa.-NextGen Healthcare. In 2008, the hospital deployed the NextGen Health Information Exchange and launched the Doylestown Clinical Network.


The Bucks County Physician Hospital Alliance is a partnership between the nearly 400 members of the Doylestown Independent Practice Association and Doylestown Hospital. While the hospital supports and drives the HIE, the independent community physicians on Doylestown Hospital's staff are the primary users.
"We are acting as an ASP; we're not collecting data," Lang said. Thus far, 185 physicians are connected to the network, 60 physicians are using its EHR and care summary report, and approximately 400,000 patients are enrolled in the HIE. "Now we need critical mass," Lang said.

To achieve critical mass, the next step is clinical integration of community physicians' non-NextGen EHRs with the hospital's EHR system, as well as implementation of its Clinical Care Document interface, Lang said.


With respect to federal incentives, the hospital is sitting pretty. As a Stage 6 hospital, Doylestown will likely have an easier time compared to other healthcare organizations meeting meaningful use criteria once they are finalized.


The Pennsylvania eHealth Initiative will be responsible for establishing a statewide HIE, which will eventually connect to the NHIN. "It positions us well," Lang said, of the Doylestown Clinical Network's ability to tap into the statewide HIE. "We will be more ready than others."