ConnectVirginia Announces On-Boarding of Three Participant Health Systems to eHEALTH Exchange

ConnectVirginia, the statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) for the Commonwealth of Virginia today announced that three of their participant health systems have successfully on-boarded to eHealth Exchange for technical connectivity.

Inova, a not-for-profit healthcare system based in Northern Virginia, was the 99th participant to join the eHealth Exchange. The University of Virginia (UVA) Health System, a not-for-profit academic healthcare system in Charlottesville, Virginia, became the 100th participant to join. Valley Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system in Winchester, Virginia, shares an electronic Health Record system with Inova, which presented an opportunity to simultaneously on-board them to the eHEALTH Exchange.

With these additions, eHealth Exchange now provides secure access to over 100 million patient records from over a third of all U.S. acute care hospitals and Federal agencies including the Veterans Health Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Social Security Administration. “By joining the eHealth Exchange, providers at these Virginia organizations are empowered to deliver more coordinated and better care to their patients,” said Mariann Yeager, CEO of The Sequoia Project, a non-profit 501c3 chartered to advance implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange. The Sequoia Project supports multiple, independent health IT interoperability initiatives, most notably: the eHealth Exchange, a rapidly growing community of exchange partners who share information under a common trust framework and a common set of rules.

ConnectVirginia expects several other Virginia Health Systems to on-board the eHealth Exchange as ConnectVirginia participants by the end of 2015. By assuming the governance and policy responsibilities, serving as a signatory of the Data Use Reciprocal Support Agreement (DURSA), and working in close collaboration with eHealth Exchange staff at The Sequoia Project, ConnectVirginia helps ensure that all participants are adhering to applicable testing and technical requirements. Once validated, a ConnectVirginia participant’s technical connectivity is the same as if the health systems were direct eHealth Exchange participants, utilizing eHealth Exchange Security Certificates and UDDI endpoints.

ConnectVirginia’s unique model of support for the exchange of patient clinical information among participating healthcare providers in Virginia via the eHealth Exchange query/retrieve profile creates advantages not only for ConnectVirginia, but also for ConnectVirginia Participants and the eHealth Exchange. According to Sandy McCleaf, ConnectVirginia’s Executive Director, “Our strategy has always included the use of national standards and the eHealth Exchange as the mechanism by which patient summary information would be shared. Duplication of technical infrastructure and testing processes was not a necessary component to execute this strategy and therefore decreases our expenses related to operation and maintenance.” ConnectVirginia Participant Health Systems avoid the extra expense and effort to connect and test with a separate ConnectVirginia infrastructure and have access to eHealth Exchange Verified products.

 

About ConnectVirginia

ConnectVirginia HIE, Inc. is the Statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) for the Commonwealth of Virginia.  It provides a safe, confidential, electronic system to support the exchange of patient medical records among healthcare providers, both here in Virginia and beyond.  ConnectVirginia HIE, Inc., a Virginia-based not-for-profit company, is led by a Board of Directors of health care professionals and executives from across the Commonwealth.

ConnectVirginia utilizes secure, electronic, internet-based technology to allow medical information to be exchanged by participating health care providers. Services include: EXCHANGE, used for the query/retrieve of patient clinical summaries via eHealth Exchange; the Public Health Reporting Pathway, used by providers as the single electronic reporting pathway to deliver electronic lab results, syndromic surveillance data, immunizations, and cancer registry data to the Virginia Department of Health; Encounter Alerts, which send secure message notifications to subscribing providers when their patient has a hospital encounter; and, the Provider Portal, which allows authorized clinicians the ability to query eHealth Exchange/ConnectVirginia Participants and receive C-CDA documents, presenting them in a single consolidated Virtual Health Record view. As a result, providers will have more complete medical information to provide higher quality care for patients and will be able to more easily coordinate treatment with other health care providers.

Learn more about ConnectVirginia at https://www.connectvirginia.org/

 

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