UP Health Info Exchange Gets Contract
MARQUETTE -- Nashville, Tenn.-based ICA, a provider of technology that enables care management and health information exchange, announced it has signed a contract with the Upper Peninsula Health Information Exchange.
The new health information exchange is sponsored by the Upper Peninsula Health Care Network and will cover approximately 300,000 people in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the initial participants being hospitals and ambulatory care centers.
UPHIE will be implementing ICA's CareAlign CareExchange platform, which is the foundation for interoperability between different health information systems. The platform also allows for direct messaging, standards-based secure clinical communications and data exchange, including HL7 and continuity of care documents. UPHIE will also be deploying CareAlign's clinical portal for use with CareExchange.
"CareExchange will enable UPHIE to provide a widely spread, largely rural population in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the tools to improve quality of care while protecting privacy, sharing costs among stakeholders, and minimizing barriers to provider participation," said David Jahn, UPHCN president and CEO of War Memorial Hospital. "In addition, ICA's broad experience in communications-based governance, as well as its modular approach to the implementation of HIE, will assist us in getting off to a fast start. The aggregation of clinical patient information from our numerous hospitals, and then using that information to provide our physicians with longitudinal health records, will aid in ensuring that vital clinical information is always available when and where it's needed."
Added Paula Johnson, director of Enterprise Business Systems at UPHCN: "The Upper Peninsula is largely rural in nature and is home to 300,000 residents. The Upper Peninsula has a rich history of collaboration among facilities, physicians, ancillary providers, and payers. The implementation of UPHIE will enable us to better tie together the widespread population, ultimately helping providers improve care coordination and better integrate transitions of care."
UPHIE covers more than 16,400 square miles and features more than 900 medical and ancillary providers.
The Upper Peninsula Health Care Network is a corporation of health care organizations formed in 1995 to facilitate access to high-quality health care at a reasonable cost. Together, UPHCN members are continuously working to provide coordinated health care delivery for residents in the Upper Peninsula and surrounding communities through the Upper Peninsula Health Information Exchange. UPHIE is charged to improve the quality, delivery, and efficiency of health care through the collaborative use of information technology and clinical data exchange. UPHIE recently selected ICA to be its HIE vendor and executed documentation for it to become an active, qualified data-sharing organization offering a new level of services to the entire Upper Peninsula via the Michigan Health Information Network backbone to the rest of Michigan. UPHIE is represented on the MiHIN Board of Directors by Dennis H. Smith and is an officially designated substate HIE in Michigan.
ICA was established to take technology developed by Vanderbilt Medical Center to the broader healthcare market, and now delivers a comprehensive health information exchange and care management solution to hospitals, IDNs, communities and states. This patient-centered modular approach offers immediate value and return-on-investment through the delivery of clinical information to the point-of-care, improving quality while reducing costs. The CareAlign solution suite provides the technology necessary to progressively exchange clinical information, increase care collaboration and manage healthcare risk across the continuum of care with the goal of improving patient outcomes while reducing costs. Visit www.icainformatics.com.
