Maine's Health Information Exchange Works for Hospitals, Doctors and Patients (Video)

This is a great video and good for anyone to watch and see how having medical record information available can save time and lives. This is what is being done in the state of Maine via HealthInfoNet and is a good snapshot of what we can hope for and expect from other states. Maine, not as heavily populated as other states was good place to begin. You can also read more at the HealthInfoNet website to see how this all comes together and the first role needed is electronic medical records at the hospital level to participate. You can listen to the doctors talk about the old way of sending faxes and receiving them compared to immediate access and with general consumer literacy and PC use, there’s not a big learning curve at all.

HealthInfoNet uses Orion Health, located in Santa Monica, California as their HIE technology partner and you can also read the white paper here. With all the recent mergers and acquisitions of HIE companies by insurance firms, Orion looks pretty good as you can see most of their board members are from New Zealand, where they got started, so again it looks like there’s no double dipping here with insurance interests and they are the technology partner getting the job done, connecting patient records without hidden agendas.

The doctor’s state in the video within 30 seconds they are in there with the records and access to labs, medications, procedures, etc. One doctor does a full walk through on the video so anyone can benefit and see how it works. Another doctor will give you a full comparison of how it works now and the old system. Another doctor opens up the chart with the patient in the room and was able to see other admissions and patient information that had occurred over time. Medications and allergy lists are critical as one of the other with interactions can kill you.

Now here’s an image of a critical care nurse and look at the screens he has open in the image to the right, he’s on it. The one doctor talks and says the learning curve is zero and compliments the hospital IT department on the great work and set up they did to help and make it easy to access. Overall this is great video and worth a watch to see what’s going with connecting hospitals and physician offices. BD

HealthInfoNet

This video provides an overview of how using HealthInfoNet's health information exchange helps health care providers in Maine improve the quality and efficiency of the care they deliver to patients. Hear from real Maine doctors, nurses and other health care professionals about their experience using HealthInfoNet to support caring for their patients.