Hear from a Peer in August Webinar, New GRITS Capability, SHIEC Conference

August 2019

August GaHIN Webinar - Hear from a Peer

How Interoperability Helps Hospitals Improve Patient Care and Care Coordination Across the Care Continuum - Wednesday, August 28

Hospitals and health systems often use their EHR to exchange patient data with each other, but what about when the patient has a current physician outside that system or has key clinical information residing with another provider? It has been estimated that a patient may have up to three healthcare providers - all from different organizations. That's the topic of the August 28 GaHIN/DCH webinar .

Our special guest will be Sandy Majors, ERH Regional Director of Operations for Physician Practices at Dorminy Medical Center, Emanuel Medical Center, Irwin County Hospital and Washington County Regional Medical Center. Her presentation, "Now That I Have It, What Do I Do With It?" will cover ways GaHIN is being used to support care coordination.

New Functionality Eases Access to GRITS Reports

Just in time for “back to school,” GaHIN and the Department of Public Health (DPH) have launched a new functionality that streamlines the process of obtaining immunization records contained in the GRITS platform. GRITS, which stands for Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services, is Georgia’s immunization registry.

With the new 3231 functionality, providers can use the GaHIN clinical viewer to search for a patient. Once found, the provider can click on the Reports tab and find a new option, 3231, which will deliver a summary PDF of all immunizations.

This advance replaces the need for providers to separately log into the GRITS system to find patient immunization information. The new format is also easier to read and print.

HIEs Gather for Annual SHIEC Conference

The 2019 Conference of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) was held August 18-21 in National Harbor, MD, bringing together the HIE community from across the United States.

SHIEC announced the results of a member survey which showed that 92 percent of the U.S. population is served by HIEs. SHIEC was founded in 2014 and now has 135 member organizations which include 76 HIE members and 59 strategic business and technology (SB&T) members (organizations that sell products and services to HIEs).

Seema Verma, Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), was the keynote speaker for the conference. Verma laid out her vision for a value-based system:

“Value-based care means upending the current paradigm, and in my view it’s not happening fast enough. It means tracking and rewarding improvements in quality, instead of paying for services regardless of outcomes. It means holding clinicians accountable for cost and quality, and then providing the flexibility they need to innovate. It means getting unnecessary government regulations out of the way, so clinicians have more time to spend with their patients and so they can provide efficient, innovative, and coordinated care without bureaucratic requirements getting in the way. It means coordinating a patient’s care across the system, instead of having patients feel like they have to navigate through a maze of fragmentation to get the care they need.”

Click here to read her full remarks.

Georgia Highlights:

Denise Hines, Executive Director of GaHIN, delivered a presentation on “Creating Value for the Government, Providers and Patients with Health Registries.”

Also speaking were Carmen L. Hughes, Executive Director, Administrator of Programs, HI-BRIDGE Solutions and HI-BRIDGE HIE, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Walkitria Smith, MD, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, Director, Morehouse Health Care Telemedicine Services, Morehouse School of Medicine. Their topic, “Using HIE Technology to Support Patient Care Coordination in Rural and Underserved Communities,” was well received by attendees.

SHIEC hands out four achievement awards annually, and Georgia’s own Georgia Regional Academic Community Health Information Exchange (GRAChIE) was recognized in conjunction with East Tennessee Health Information Network, North Carolina HIE Authority, MedVirginia and Coastal Connect in the Community Partnership Category.