Here's a pop quiz on healthcare information technology, geography, culinary traditions and public health.
Where in the world was David Blumenthal on Tuesday if the eight-county region he was visiting has had an operating clinical health information exchange since 2008 but is better known for its spicy chicken wings and lake-effect blizzards?
The answer is western New York—Buffalo, specifically, the home of not only Buffalo hot wings but also HealtheLink, a regional health information exchange, or RHIO, that in May received a nearly $16.1 million Beacon Community grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The award, provided to help the region combat rising diabetes rates, was the largest of 17 Beacon Community grants distributed across the country.
"I would like to congratulate Buffalo and the western New York community for collaborating to strengthen a clinical information exchange and related care-coordination program that exemplifies our aspirations for creating a national health information technology infrastructure aimed at realizing specific healthcare quality and efficiency goals," Blumenthal said in a news release issued in conjunction with his visit to the HealtheLink office in Buffalo.
HealtheLink Chairman Michael Cropp, a physician and the president and CEO of Independent Health, a Buffalo-based health plan, added that the "growing incidence of diabetes in western New York and across the country is staggering." Cropp said the Beacon award will help the area battle diabetes "with improved care coordination and new resources available through the HealtheLink network."
Targets set for the Beacon program call for HealtheLink to demonstrate cost savings and care improvements, evidenced by a 5% reduction in emergency room visits, a 5% drop in hospitalizations and a 5% lowering of 30-day readmission rates for diabetic patients. The program also aims to boost by 10% vaccinations of diabetic patients for pneumonia and influenza.
HealtheLink Executive Director Daniel Porreca said in a telephone interview that Blumenthal's visit and the attendant publicity that it is generating will help the RHIO gain visibility in the community and win support of two key groups of constituents.
"We're doing PR stuff all the time," Porreca said. "The key to the success overall is participation of physicians. They need to be brought in and using the tools we're delivering, but we also need the consumers. We could put all the great technology in place and we could put a monitoring system in the patient's home, and if they go back to the couch and eat Twinkies and smoke, we're not going to be able to move the metrics."
Porreca said HealtheLink recently hired a project director for the Beacon Community program and is looking to add six to eight employees to help run it. HealtheLink also is working closely with the P2 Collaborative of WYN, the local, federally funded regional health IT extension center that, like the Beacon program, is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus law.
The western New York RHIO serves about 700 participating providers, including 10 hospital systems. With 4,000 to 4,500 providers in its service area, though, there's still work to do in terms of recruitment, Porreca said.
One advantage HealtheLink enjoys is that office-based physicians in the region are above-average adopters of EHR systems: About 40% are EHR users, Porreca estimates, compared with about 27% of physicians nationwide who use a basic EHR system, according to the ONC. Another edge is that an electronic information exchange has been up and running in western New York for nearly a decade and had already proved its worth to the healthcare community before it ever began handling clinical data. It was organized in 2000 and 2001 as HealtheNet around the computerization of administrative processes such as patient eligibility checking, and it enjoyed financial support from the three main western New York payers that cover about 70% of the insured patients in the region, Porreca said.
"It was an all-payer search, so the providers only have to go to one place," Porreca said. About 85% of the clinics, hospitals and practices in the region now use HealthENet administrative services, he added.
In 2004, when President George W. Bush set a goal of making electronic medical records available to most Americans, health leaders in western New York responded to the challenge.
"That set up a flurry of grassroots efforts in the community," Porreca said. "The folks that started HealtheNet decided to see if it made sense to extend the collaboration to the clinical stuff. They brought in a consultant and the answer was a resounding yes." Western New York won a first-round New York
"HEAL" grant in 2006, and the exchange moved its first clinical data in 2008, Porreca said.
About 500 HealtheLink-connected physicians use their own EHRs, Porreca said. For those without their own EHR system, the exchange provides Internet-based connectivity and lookup services as well as e-prescribing.
