News
UHIN Brings Electronic Health Information Exchange to Utah |
| 03/02/2010 |
| News >> Community News |
Since 2007, the UHIN Board of Directors has been seriously exploring how to leverage UHIN’s existing gateway (UHIN has exchanged administrative health transactions: claims, remits, eligibility inquires etc, since 1994) to achieve our mission of reducing cost and improving the quality of care in Utah through the operation of a secure health exchange network. The Board of Directors has broad based community representation including Utah hospitals, health care clinicians, insurers, consumers, and state government. This broad-based effort has resulted in the creation of the clinical health information exchange, or cHIE.
The goal of the cHIE is to ‘connect the dots’. That is, to ensure that no matter where a person receives care in Utah, any participating health care provider can –with that patient’s permission (patients can opt-out)- receive basic medical information about that patient from all the other health care providers in Utah that have treated that patient. This information including allergies, immunizations, prescriptions, lab results, and problems, may be missing when a clinician treats a patient. An example is the person who lives in Salt Lake, travels to Moab to do some mountain biking, and ends up in the Allen Memorial Hospital (Moab’s only hospital) with an injury. The ER docs know little to nothing about this person. It is frighteningly easy to receive treatment that may be injurious or ever deadly without key medical information on allergies, current prescriptions, and current problems about this patient.
UHIN is proud to announce that on May 10, 2010, UHIN will be hosting the cHIE Promontory Point Kick-off event. The Governor will sign a declaration, celebrating May 10, 2010 as Utah Healthcare Connectivity Day. On that day, Allen Memorial Hospital, Central Utah Clinic, the University of Utah, Brigham City Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare, and others will demonstrate how the cHIE works to improve health care in Utah.
