BHIX Success: Sharing Information Around Brooklyn

Posted by Crysta Anderson • 8 January 2010 •

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BHIX is improving patient care across Brooklyn with a patient registry

Brooklyn Health Information Exchange (BHIX) was formed in 2007 as a consortium of hospitals, nursing homes, home health providers, health insurers and consumer representatives. With 2.5 million residents, Brooklyn is the most populous borough in New York City. Many residents have multiple healthcare providers and travel within and beyond the borough for care.

Brooklyn is very diverse, and home to about 20 percent of the state’s Medicaid patients. Eleven percent of its residents are over the age of 65.

Irene Koch, executive director of BHIX, explained the goal: “We needed an electronic health system that would identify patients who are the same across different institutions (even if their names are spelled differently, addresses have changed or records have typographical errors), to help us mobilize patient data from an institution and share it across borders, subject to applicable patient consent rules.”

In addition, BHIX recognized the need to implement a transparent data governance structure that would protect patient privacy, facilitate comprehensive consent and information flow policies and enable participation by a large number of health care providers

BHIX is using a standards-based information exchange platform that includes Initiate^®Patient - a patient registry that creates a comprehensive view of all records across BHIX’s participating entities and makes them available to clinicians connected to BHIX.

Now, clinicians participating in BHIX can treat patients more effectively by securely accessing records from various clinical locations and sources in Brooklyn.

“The BHIX technology had to make information readily accessible by all authorized and approved clinicians across multiple organizations, while supporting the required governance and privacy rules of how data is made available,” said Ms. Koch.

BHIX is achieving four key objectives for patient identification, including:

Scalability: Supports millions of records, disparate health information systems and billions of transactions

Accuracy: Creates unique patient identifiers across an extremely diverse set of systems with inconsistent and unreliable data quality

Flexibility: Enables a hybrid data governance and data exchange model across sometimes competing stakeholders

Security: Protects patient privacy by enabling unique data governance rules.

“We got the BHIX system up and running in less than a year, and it is one of the most cutting edge projects of its kind in the country,” Koch continued. “Care teams from participating organizations throughout Brooklyn can now securely access a single, accurate view of the patient and related records from the web-enabled portal in real time. This has informed decision making by providing more accurate and complete information at the point of care and has helped increase adoption by clinicians and their patients.”

BHIX is already seeing results and has a solid plan for further expansion. As of September 2009:

The system has managed 5 million messages over the course of the last year
Initiate is supporting 15 systems in 9 facilities across Brooklyn and Queens
The data being shared includes patient demographics, advance directives, physicians and primary contacts, allergies, medications, problem lists and diagnoses, and procedures

Tagged as: Customers, Health Information Exchange, MDM, Patient Registry