The New Mexico Health Information Collaborative (NMHIC) has successfully created a secure exchange of patient health information used both within New Mexico as well as for their bordering states. This Health Information Exchange (HIE) is constantly growing and receives data from 58% of New Mexico Hospital beds, 73% of emergency department admissions, and 80% of overall admissions. A variety of organizations across the care spectrum participate, including hospital groups, physician groups, laboratories, hospice and many more. 

An HIE provides the foundational technology for clinicians to access an up to date, comprehensive patient health record through the secure exchange of patient health data among diverse and unrelated healthcare organisations and EHR systems that follow industry accepted interoperability standards.  

The organisation’s ongoing goal is to create a truly complete health record for each patient—making it the trusted source of information for all state health entities. To accomplish this, important challenges needed to be addressed.

These included:
  • Getting everyone on board: Comprehensiveness ultimately requires that nearly all providers agree to share information using the same tools, the same way.
  • Accommodating expanding data sets: Healthcare is moving well beyond basic claims and clinical data and is increasingly able to collect a wealth of “non-traditional” data types, such as social determinant, behavioral, and public health.
  • Supporting secure communications: Private and secure information among all constituents is a must, which must adhere to all necessary security requirements.
  • Ensuring workflow integration: Information needs to be delivered at the right place and right time, letting caregivers focus on patient care, rather than the administrative burden of logging into multiple systems at once.

After careful consideration, NMHIC decided to partner with Orion Health in order to make their data integration goals come to life.

With Orion Health, three major features were implemented, including:
  • Clinical Data Repository: Building on Orion’s Rhapsody foundation, data was consolidated from a variety of clinical sources to build a unified record of a patient’s data. This included demographics, history, procedures, medications, problems, and much more. Users can now access information easily via the Orion Health Clinical Portal, which presents accessible clean data that can be used to power meaningful analytics to help proactively identify at-risk individuals.
  • Communicate: Communicate operates like email, but with point-to-point encryption to ensure the secure transfer of information between providers.
  • Amadeus: Building on the Rhapsody base, Orion Health’s Amadeus product “future-proofs” by managing the growing levels of non-traditional data needed for population health management, which can be fed into real-time analytics engines. 

Success has been hard to ignore, involving major improvements to hospital admissions (well-under national and local benchmarks), diagnoses and even costs. For example, thanks to accurate access to complete patient data, one case avoided a costly antidote of $1,400 per dose, and another resulted in improved reimbursement rates. The future is bright for the NMHIC’s use of Orion Health, with its eye on expanding analytics capabilities, care applications, new health data types, and ultimately, the numbers of lives saved.

To learn more about New Mexico’s comprehensive health data approach, read our case study.

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