Know-how

Health Information Exchange

“CGI continues to be instrumental to our growth. CGI’s ability to construct a standards-based exchange enables our clinicians to securely share critical patient information.”

Liesa Jenkins, Executive Director, CareSpark

CareSpark is a mature health information exchange (HIE) network serving a 34 county area of east Tennessee and southwest Virginia. CareSpark’s regional network provides access to health information at the point of care for use in patient care and treatment, including medication management, diagnostic services, preventative medicine, and disease management, supported by technology, training, clinical process improvement, and incentives.

The Challenge
CareSpark’s challenge was to connect a myriad of healthcare stakeholders with varying technical capabilities, in accordance with evolving standards at state and federal levels.  With help from CGI, and a consortium of technology partners, CareSpark has grown from a grass-roots health improvement coalition to an operational HIE in 2008 and a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN)-ready network in 2009.

How CGI Helped

CareSpark selected CGI to provide project management and technical architecture services to design and implement CareSpark’s regional HIE network. The CGI team led the design, installation, configuration, and support of CareSpark’s infrastructure, built to comply with Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) and NHIN specifications. CGI’s team adapted CareSpark’s network to enable its ability to participate in the NHIN Trial Implementation project, successfully demonstrating how health care organizations and several Federal agencies could electronically exchange information through a “network of networks.”  In CareSpark’s case, CGI helped demonstrate how local providers were able to retrieve patient records from nearby Richmond, Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, and the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs’ electronic health record systems. 

The Results
CareSpark’s HIE network offers an on-demand, universal view of a patient’s record across multiple care settings. This solution has yielded many positive results for key healthcare stakeholders including patients, clinicians and employers.

• Improved access to health information and clinical best practices to support better-informed decisions as clinicians exchange critical patient information
• Clinical document growth rate of 25,000 documents per month including lab, medication, allergy, radiology, and immunization records
• Increased patient satisfaction with patient participation growth rate of 75,000 per quarter
• Reduced incidence of medical errors and duplicated services
• Reduced operational costs
• Lower malpractice claims and insurance costs

The bottom line: CGI helped CareSpark deliver relevant information and decision support capabilities at the point of care for improved health outcomes, increased patient safety and more efficient delivery of services.

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