Interoperability: Community Interchange Application

The Community Interchange application is a set of interrelated technologies that enable connectivity between community members by bridging the gaps between differing data exchange protocols and variations in electronic health record (EHR) capabilities so providers can find the right patient data at the right time. Improve provider workflows by combining HL7 2.x and continuity of care document (CCD) data from multiple sources into a single comprehensive CCD that eliminates duplicated data and organizes all available patient data into a single document that can be quickly understood and consumed by EHR applications.

Note: Community Interchange is NOT included in the Technology Access subscription or Technology Library.

Community Interchange bridges data protocol gaps by combining patient data from different sources to deliver a comprehensive CCD seamlessly into provider workflows.

The problem

Exchanging and aggregating patient data from different systems throughout the community can be challenging. In the early stages of pre-interoperability, healthcare organizations collected clinical data from across the community through faxes and multiple paper care documents. With little time to search through multiple documents to find needed patient data, providers were faced with making decisions based on an incomplete picture of a patient’s health status, which can lead to less effective care, duplicative tests and unnecessary costs. Today, electronic health records (EHR) applications can now electronically exchange patient information, but the capabilities and supported data exchange protocols differ between EHR vendors, which still often leaves providers with an incomplete picture of a patient’s health status. Community Interchange takes the complexity out of data exchange and bridges the gaps between data protocols and EHR solutions, so providers can quickly and easily find the right patient data at the right time, and have it delivered seamlessly into their workflows.

Our approach

Community Interchange bridges the communication gaps between differing technologies through a propriety set of interrelated technologies, so providers can find the right patient data at the right time, quickly and easily. Through the use of bi-directional queries, it aggregates, normalizes and deduplicates data from multiple systems across the community, to create one comprehensive longitudinal patient CCD making it easy and efficient for providers to review a patient’s health history. Community Interchange revolutionizes provider workflows, by minimizing the time spent on tracking down patient records, so providers can spend more time focused on delivering better patient care.

Benefits and features

• Eliminates the complexity of sharing CCDs – Utilizes protocol bridging technology to break down the technology barriers between different EHR systems across the community to enable true system interoperability.
• Streamlines access to multiple data sources with one single click – Supports bi-directional queries between networks with a “one to many” connectivity approach to allow providers to query multiple community sources simultaneously when looking for available information about their patients.
• Improve quality of care – Provides a comprehensive view of a patient’s health history from all sources across the community, so providers will spend less time tracking down patient records and more time focused on delivering better care to patients.
• Unlocks data and turns it into a strategic asset – Aggregates, normalizes and deduplicates data from multiple systems, records, and CCDs to create a single, comprehensive, longitudinal CCD that can be used for delivering patient care or for analytic purposes.
• Improves care coordination and delivers key information for care transitions – Gives providers access to both acute care and ambulatory patient information, aggregated from multiple systems from across the community, to help facilitate seamless transitions of care.

Use cases

• A public health organization and a private, nonprofit health system share patients and want to share their clinical data so community providers have access to comprehensive patient information. Unfortunately, the two organizations use different technology systems that are unable to communicate. Community Interchange was deployed to bridge the gap between these two networks and enabled the two healthcare organizations to share clinical information through bi-directional queries, effectively enhancing the capabilities of both organizations.
• A physician’s network utilizes Community Interchange’s protocol to bridge their technology and provide network physicians the ability to view a patient’s health history from a variety of different data sources from within their own EMR. With comprehensive data, providers are able to close gaps in their patient records and provide quality care.
• A new patient presents for care, and the specialist provider leverages Community Interchange to query all available community sources and view a complete clinical history for the new patient; to avoid duplicate testing and improve the quality of care.
• A clinical analyst previously relied on manual processes to aggregate and standardize patient health histories from multiple sources across the community in order to perform analytic activities. With Community Interchange, these manual processes are eliminated and gaps in the data are minimized, ultimately improving the quality of the data.