Fallon Clinic Begins Data Exchange with Health Alliance Hospital ER - Massachusetts

This is actually a a pretty neat story in the fact that Fallon Clinic wrote their own interchange, impressive. I say that having written an EMR years ago, thus I have great admiration for the organization for taking on the task. You can read more details here. Based in Worcester, Fallon Clinic has over 1,700 employees and nearly 250 physicians who see more than a million patients a year more than 20 locations. This was not a short project by any means though as the organization started in the year 2003, so lots of work, planning and programming to make it happen.

In looking at the site, it appears their EHR system is Epic from the log on for the patient chart system, so it appears the aggregation takes information from the Epic system and stores it in SQL Server. The only cost as stated for the other end is the purchase of SQL server. Video from Safe Health can be seen here. Here are a couple screenshots below that offer some of the topics discussed. Listen to Dr. Halamka talk about how often they are attacked on the server network and what they do to ensure secure record keeping. Hope some ears are open here, He spends a million dollars a year on security just for the medical records, so don’t take this part lightly, invest and have good security. BD

WORCESTER, MA – HealthAlliance Hospital and Fallon Clinic are the first two healthcare organizations to go live with SAFEHealth (Secure Architecture For Exchanging Health Information), a regional health information exchange based in Worcester, Mass.

When Fallon Clinic patients at HealthAlliance Hospital's emergency department give their consent, ED physicians can access their medical charts from the clinic in real time. Armed with relevant clinical data, ED physicians can deliver care in a timely, cost-effective manner.

Patient consent can also occur at registration. "We get consent when and where it's most relevant," Garber said.

Once the consent is entered into the consent portal, physicians have access to the data. Whatever workflow occurs during the patient's stay, identical copies of the data flows into both EHR systems at the hospital and clinic, he said.

Fallon Clinic wrote the software using the Microsoft .NET framework. It provides the software free. The only cost to participating healthcare organizations is the purchase of Microsoft's SQL server and its license.