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This past week we extended a thank you to our customers and partners for a successful year. We would like to share our thanks with our Connections subscribers as well. Connections readers span categories and specialties from doctors and care managers to IT specialists and administrators. Not all of our readers work in health care but we're all interested in seeing Wisconsin make progress with interoperability.
Our theme for the year was "moving to the next level" and we're happy to report that, with your help, we have been able to see this theme through in many different ways:
- We added 300 sites of care to WISHIN Pulse which also now includes data on nearly 4.4 million patients, a 33% increase from last year.
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- Overall usage of Pulse has grown immensely. We saw a 12-fold increase in queries, while total records accessed increase by a factor of 20 from October 2015 to October 2016.
- We hosted our first Wisconsin HIE Summit in March with nearly 100 attendees.
- Thanks to our strong partnership by the state of Wisconsin, the WISHIN Pulse Community Health Record now includes data from the Wisconsin Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, Medicaid prescription-fill data, and immunization history and schedule information from the Wisconsin Immunization Registry.
- Our partnership also saw to the completion of phase two of our Patient Activity Report (PAR) notification function for payers and clinics.
Participation by clients and partners advances our efforts to inform clinical decision-making, care coordination and care transitions wherever patients encounter the health care system in Wisconsin. We are deeply grateful for their continued support and help in reaching the achievements above.
In 2017, however, we want to highlight more than numbers.
For those of us embedded in health information exchange or health IT daily, it can be easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of the mission, like specifications for implementations, usage statistics and numbers of transactions. Next year we want to focus on why the numbers matter: improving the health of individuals and communities all across Wisconsin.
But we'll need your help. Please, let us know how WISHIN played a part in changing an outcome for your patients. If checking lab results in WISHIN Pulse prevented repeat testing or unnecessary treatment, if a PAR notification helped to manage a patient experiencing a chronic condition, or a quick look at a med list suggested a patient was experiencing side effects, we would love to hear about it.
WISHIN and HIE aren't just experiments. The WISHIN Pulse Community Health Record is real, it's growing every month and it's making a real impact on care for patients and caregiving for providers. As our organization and our network matures, feedback from our users, partners, advocates and even skeptics will help us continue to tell our story and improve our services.
Thank you for following another year of WISHIN news.
As always, please get in touch if you have any questions, comments, or stories you would like to share.
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