Clinicians and patients across New York City benefit from Hixny’s development efforts.
“This has been brewing for a while,” begins Tom Moore, Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning & Operations at Healthix. “We initially implemented an EPIC app from another HIE’s platform, giving providers access to critical patient information within their EHR, but its performance on top of the HealthShare platform was problematic. While we were struggling to overcome them, Hixny reached out to ask if we’d be interested in licensing the patient record snapshot. We decided to make the switch, swapping out our prior installation entirely.”
That decision on the part of Healthix, the HIE serving Southern New York, means that providers from the Canadian border all the way into the canyons of Manhattan are seeing the same view of patient records. In addition, since Healthix reports that many hospitals and ambulatory networks in the city are using the EPIC EHR system, which has already accepted the Concise app (the Healthix-licensed snapshot app), technical integration will not be a barrier to widespread adoption.
“Part of our pride is in stewarding the data properly,” Moore explains. “Concise does a terrific job addressing the problem of workflow and control over the user experience. Hixny’s done a fantastic job of developing and designing the user interface. Generally, most of our users see this as a more user-friendly way of getting information about patients across their community, outside of Epic. Concise makes it easy to get a quick snapshot and drill into more detail if desired.”
Regarding the potential New York State 1115 Medicaid waiver and the role of integrated clinical care and social referral efforts, Moore sees great promise in Concise. “Addressing those social determinants is a big part of the official role for QEs in New York.” Healthix users “loved” Hixny’s social referral tool concept, which is not yet active in Concise, says Moore, and are “bugging us for timelines for launch.”
Moore looks forward to an upcoming evolution of the snapshot that will highlight gaps in care, which are of critical importance to providers in the value-based care model. “Maybe rather than recreating that for our own data, we can use our own through an API,” he muses.
