Health information exchanges are a critical tool for helping care providers collaborate on treating individual patients. And HIEs also can be used to provide great insights into patient population health trends and guide large-scale wellness programs.
The New York State Department of Health last year joined forces with Hixny, a regional health information organization, in launching a pilot project to gauge whether HIEs could help the National Million Hearts Campaign achieve its goal of preventing 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2017.
Scott Momrow, vice president of marketing and outreach for Hixny, will present key findings from the pilot at the HIMSS15 conference during a session titled, “HIE for Population Health: The NY Million Hearts Campaign.” He also will discuss how the federal initiative is an example of a multi-sector population health improvement program.
Begun in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and several partners, the National Million Hearts Campaign focuses specifically on identifying and treating Americans with hypertension or high blood pressure.
“The Department of Health wanted to leverage real-time clinical information in the health information exchanges to see if they could improve their surveillance capabilities,” Momrow said.
Specifically, the goal of the pilot was to evaluate whether data within the Hixny HIE – which serves nearly 2 million residents of New York’s Capital Region – could help identify people in the area with undiagnosed hypertension.
“They don’t have information at a sub-county level to look at zip codes or census blocks to determine where there might be hotspots,” Momrow explained.
By connecting health plans, hospitals, physician practices, employers, government agencies and patients, Hixny eliminates “silos of information” that hamper care providers in the region, Momrow added. “HIEs help mobilize clinical information and make it available to providers and patients when they need it. That’s our mission.”
“HIE for Population Health: The NY Million Hearts Campaign” will be held on Monday, April 13, from 1 to 2 p.m. in Room S404 of Chicago’s McCormick Place.
