Medicity Selected as Vendor for Ohio’s Health Information Exchange

CliniSync will enable Ohio doctors and hospitals to exchange patient information.

Columbus, Ohio, May 10, 2011—Ohio will soon have a health information exchange where physicians and hospitals can securely share patient information with one another across the state.

The Ohio Health Information Partnership has selected Medicity as the vendor to create the technological infrastructure for CliniSync, which is the name of the state’s new health information exchange.

“We’re confident in selecting Medicity, an experienced vendor with 11 years of proven success in health information exchange,” said Dan Paoletti, acting chief information officer of the Ohio Health Information Partnership and vice president of OHA Solutions at the Ohio Hospital Association.

“CliniSync will provide a tool for the secure, electronic exchange of patient information that will help transform Ohio’s healthcare system. We’re confident in Medicity as the catalyst for this long-overdue transformation,” he said.

“Instead of relying on the transmission of paper records about a patient’s condition – including lab results, past medical history, medications and other test results – Ohio’s healthcare providers can use CliniSync to electronically access that information, with a patient’s consent, over this secure, protected network,” Paoletti said.

“While hospital and healthcare providers may have been able to exchange this information within their own walls or even regionally, they now will ‘talk’ to one another electronically from city to city, from rural practices to regional hospitals through CliniSync,” he said.

Brent Dover, Medicity’s president, said CliniSync will join the 760 hospitals, 125,000 physicians and 250,000 end users already served by Medicity’s health information solution suite.

“We’re pleased to partner with the Ohio Health Information Partnership to power the secure exchange of health information to drive improved care collaboration and health outcomes for Ohioans,” Dover said.

“We will provide the latest technology and standards to connect hospitals, physicians and other providers, engage patients, make clinical data available at the point of care, achieve administrative efficiencies, improve care quality and demonstrate meaningful use,” he said.

“While this will take time over the next two years to fully implement, the first phase of securing at least 10 hospital systems will begin this summer,” said Fred Richards, chief information officer and chief operations officer for the Ohio Health Information Partnership.

“We’re happy with Medicity’s platform, which allows us to integrate electronic health record systems quickly and easily while national standards are still under development and to evolve to incorporate new standards,” Richards said.

Under a federal grant program from the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT, Ohio already has 3,690 physicians signed up for electronic health record systems out of 6,000 slots available from the federal government. Doctors are now receiving free services at regional extension centers across Ohio to prepare for and adopt electronic health records. CliniSync will now allow them to share those records with one another.

“We want to improve basic care today. We want to use this platform to integrate existing and developing electronic health record systems so individual physicians can improve patient care today. It’s really about saving time, money and lives. We can do this now,” Richards added.

Specifically, Medicity’s HIE solutions will:

• Establish a longitudinal health record for each patient so that authorized providers can see a patient’s complete medical history
• Enable physicians to communicate about patient care multi-directionally across organizational boundaries
• Support hospitals and physicians as they demonstrate meaningful use of their electronic health records so they qualify for federal incentive funds
• Empower Ohio to connect to any other state or regional health information exchange network
• Facilitate coordinated exchange within Ohio’s state departments to report on public health issues at both state and federal levels
• Assist Ohio in providing physicians with a direct, protected and secure email system under the federal Direct Project initiative

“While this all sounds futuristic and abstract to most people, we really have the capacity to make this happen through Medicity and CliniSync,” Richards said.

“Physicians can be the early adopters of this technology, and get free services and reimbursement from the federal government now. It’s really a business decision,” Richards said. “We’re hoping to bring them on board now so they can take advantage of this tremendous national funding and a push toward advanced health information technology.”

For more information, go to www.ohiponline.org or to Medicity at www.medicity.com.

About Medicity
Medicity, the industry standard for health information exchange (HIE), is the leading innovator and largest provider of HIE technology – with more than 750 hospitals, 125,000 physicians and 250,000 end users in its connected ecosystem. Medicity’s solutions empower hospitals, physicians and HIEs with secure access to and exchange of health information – improving the quality and efficiency of patient care locally, regionally and nationally. For more information, please visit www.medicity.com or follow us on twitter.com/Medicity.