FORT EDWARD – Fort Hudson Health System, a Washington County provider of services to seniors, is now sharing information from its skilled nursing center through Hixny and has started the process of connecting its home healthcare agency to the health information exchange (HIE) as well.
Fort Hudson Nursing Center was the first nursing home to “go live” with Hixny in mid-July. Amanda Waite, nursing center administrator and chief compliance officer at Fort Hudson, said patient records, including the current medications list, diagnoses and other pertinent information, are automatically dispatched whenever a nursing home resident is transferred to the hospital. The nursing home also uses Hixny to find information about new patients admitted for rehabilitation. This supplements the information available through its direct link to the electronic medical record (EMR) system at Glens Falls Hospital, where 95 percent of its admissions originate.
“The physicians would tell the ward clerks, ‘Get all the records you possibly can from their primary, their specialists, from whomever,’” Waite said. “So, a major amount of time was spent calling those offices and having them send that information. The beautiful thing now is, all the clerks have to do is go into Hixny, pull all that information and save a lot of time.”
She said there has been no problem getting consent from patients or their designated caregivers.
“That part has been very simple,” Waite said. “They are very familiar with the Hixny form because they sign them in the hospital, they sign them in providers’ offices …”
With the Fort Hudson Nursing Center connection up and running, the focus has turned to its sister organization, Fort Hudson Home & Community Services, a certified home health agency serving seniors in Warren, Washington and Saratoga counties.
Waite said it is not uncommon for home care patients to eventually become nursing home residents. “The idea is that, if all of us are feeding information into [Hixny], it’s just going to streamline processes. Right now, a lot of that is on paper.”
Fort Hudson Home & Community recently became part of the Adirondack Health Institute Health Home, a network of organizations that coordinate medical and behavioral healthcare for high-risk Medicaid members. Waite said sharing information through Hixny will be “huge” in that setting.
Fort Hudson adds to Hixny’s continuous improvement in achieving meaningful exchanges of health information in the region. With more connections, and with patient consent, the healthcare community in the region and across the state can access the records needed to better coordinate care for all New Yorkers.
Hixny, a not-for-profit healthcare collaborative, is a national leader in population health management support. Hixny utilizes secure technology to provide individuals, healthcare providers, payers and public health entities with the ability to share and use real-time electronic health records. This coordination of data enhances care for more than 1.7 million people in New York’s Capital District, Northern New York and the Mohawk Valley.
View a complete list of organizations currently sharing information through Hixny.
