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Carefx Takes the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHIX) “Live” in Less than 5 Months
24 hospitals leverage the integrated platform to conduct teleconsultations
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 2, 2008 — Carefx today announced the “go live” of its integrated, open systems platform for the Louisiana Rural Health Information Exchange (LARHIX). This secure, web-based infrastructure developed in collaboration with industry leaders CA, IBM and Initiate Systems, provides the real-time electronic data exchange for the teleconsultation services linking the 24 Northern Louisiana community providers with Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) in Shreveport.
“LARHIX has set the new standard and a model for successful deployment of a Health Information Exchange to serve its rural population,” said Andy Hurd, Chairman and CEO of Carefx. “We are excited and proud to be a part of this initiative that combines the Carefx interoperability platform for access to a patient’s complete medical record with the teleconsult services to empower specialists at LSU to provide world class healthcare to patients in areas of the state that specialty care would otherwise not be available. This is healthcare as it should be, not restricted by geographic separation or the limits of disparate or proprietary information systems.”
The milestone event was marked with a legislative walk-thru and live demonstrations on March 27, 2008, at the Richland Parish Hospital in Delhi and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. The event demonstrated how a patient suffering from heart disease could “attend” his appointment with a Shreveport-based heart specialist, with full access to the patient’s clinical record, without leaving his rural Louisiana hospital via the new telemedicine program.
According to Louisiana Senator Francis Thompson, who attended the event, “This eHealth initiative will have a tremendous impact on our communities. LSU physicians access to rural patient information combined with the telemedicine services will not only provide patients with easy access to specialists’ care, but they will also reduce the often prohibitive costs and logistics associated with receiving such care.”
The integrated platform employs a federated model that offers clinicians secure, anywhere, anytime access to a portalbased view of patient-centric data housed in disparate applications across multiple hospitals. Fusion from Carefx provides the platform, architecture and aggregate view of real-time patient data. IBM Websphere provides the portal framework while user authentication and single sign-on, policy-based authorization, identity federation, and auditing of access is provided by CA’s Identity & Access Management suite of products. The architecture and data flow among the four technology partners ensures accurate patient identification based on an enterprise master person index (EMPI) supplied by Initiate Systems.
Seven of the 24 Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition (LRHC) members are participating in the first year: Richland Parish Hospital in Delhi, Homer Memorial Hospital in Homer, Union General Hospital in Farmerville, LaSalle General Hospital in Jena, Hardtner Medical Center in Olla, DeSoto Regional Health System in Mansfield, and Bunkie General Hospital in Bunkie.
Added Hurd, “By utilizing Carefx’s federated data model LARHIX was able to avoid the politics of data ownership and the costly and time consuming “heavy lifting” of creating and maintaining duplicate data bases that have plagued or killed other HIE initiatives. By understanding not just the technology needs, but the practical needs for physicians and patients we have effectively worked with our technology partners to deploy an interoperable, patient-centric platform that provides real-time data sharing and collaboration across the 24 community hospitals in just months, instead of years.”
This eHealth program was made possible by funds appropriated in the 2007 Louisiana Legislative session, spearheaded by the Senate President, Don Hines, and Representative Francis Thompson. “This extremely important initiative empowers our state’s valuable caregivers with the means to interact and share critical data more efficiently and effectively, resulting in better services for our state’s rural and underserved communities,” said Sen. Hines.
The next phase of the eHealth rollout will expand to 54 new remote locations serving more than 1.4 million unique patients.
About Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition, Inc.
The Louisiana Rural Hospital Coalition provides its 41 member hospitals with regulatory, legal, financial and legislative advocacy for both member hospitals and provider-based rural health clinics. The Coalition pursues such strategies with a goal of making the rural hospital the “medical home” for all members of the community regardless of their ability to pay. The Coalition believes that the small rural hospital provider-based clinic can serve as a model for providing primary and preventative health care services to the rural citizens and establish ongoing relationships between such patients and primary care providers.
About Carefx Corporation
Carefx is the only provider of an open and scalable Patient Information Aggregation platform that provides clinicians real-time access to information residing in disparate applications. Fusion from Carefx® aids clinicians with sleek, intuitive and flexible access to patient information and satisfies IT imperatives by fully leveraging legacy investments within an open architecture. For more information, visit www.carefx.com.
About IBM
IBM Healthcare Software Group is one of the largest software interoperability suppliers to healthcare with decades of experience delivering software, services and hardware to RHIOs, NHINs and hospitals. For more information about IBM Healthcare please visit: http://www.ibm.com/industries/healthcare.
About Initiate Systems
Initiate Systems, Inc. enables organizations to strategically leverage and share critical data assets. Its Master Data Management (MDM) software and experience as an information exchange leader provide organizations with complete, accurate and real-time views of data spread across multiple systems or databases, even outside the firewall. This allows companies to unlock the value of their data assets for competitive advantages or operational improvements. Initiate Systems operates globally through its subsidiaries, with corporate headquarters in Chicago and offices across the U.S., and Toronto, London and Sydney. For more information, visit www.initiatesystems.com.
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