Federated-model HIE Connects 16 Unaffiliated Hospitals

by Cheryl Proval

When the 16 hospitals of the Western North Carolina Health Network (WNCHN) sat down to create a federated model for a health information exchange (HIE) four years ago, they could find no examples of unaffiliated institutions sharing health data, so WNCHN essentially began with a tabula rasa.

“At the time we were developing this, there were no HIEs that were being built among disparate systems, so a lot of this we set with a blank piece of paper.”
—Dana J. Gibson, MPH, CPHIT, CPHQ, vice president, Data Link Services, WNCHN, Asheville, North Carolina

Andrew Well, MD

Dana J. Gibson, MPH, CPHIT, CPHQ

Harold Moore, CIO

Building on a federation founded to collaborate on quality-improvement goals and, later, to achieve economies through group purchasing, Dana J. Gibson and the 16 member hospitals built an HIE called Data Link, which gives approximately 1,500 physicians in the region access to admission and discharge information and to laboratory, microbiology, and radiology reports, as well as to information on patients’ medications and allergies, discharge summaries, histories and physicals, and other transcribed reports, such as consultative notes. Gibson, MPH, CPHIT, CPHQ, is vice president, Data Link Services, WNCHN, Asheville.

The next steps will be to add physician-office electronic medical records (EMRs) to Data Link and, significantly for the radiologists in the network, to provide access to diagnostic-quality medical images. “We are in the process of identifying specifications and identifying companies that would like to participate in that development and deployment,” Andrew Wells, MD, radiologist, Margaret Pardee Memorial Hospital, Hendersonville, explains.