MAeHC Participates in Successful Massachusetts HIWay Kick-Off
The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), a non-profit pioneer and leader in healthcare delivery through health information technology, announced it participated in the official launch of the statewide healthcare information exchange, known as the Massachusetts Health Information Highway (HIway). During the kickoff event at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Governor Deval Patrick executed the exchange’s first transaction, transmitting his own health record between two hospitals on opposite ends of the Commonwealth. As part of the event, dubbed the “Golden Spike”, MAeHC successfully received a health record from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) into its Quality Data Center (QDC), a hosted clinical quality measurement and reporting solution that helps provider organizations easily and accurately meet the performance measurement and reporting requirements of a wide range of government, private payer and internal quality initiatives.
“We are thrilled that the QDC was able to demonstrate the Massachusetts HIway’s ability to securely send a standardized patient medical record during today’s Golden Spike,” said Micky Tripathi, CEO for MAeHC. “This marks another huge advancement for the state’s healthcare information infrastructure and the safe and efficient transportation of EHRs. Today’s event was also a great opportunity to showcase the QDC’s ability to accept patient data and normalize it for reporting to various regulatory and compliance programs such as Meaningful Use and PQRS, all of which are aimed at improving the delivery of patient care.”
Upon receiving the BIDMC patient record, MAeHC’s QDC extracted the clinical data elements of the transmitted medical record and prepared it for future analysis and reporting. Now the medical record which belongs to Kathy Halamka, co-owner at Unity Farm and wife of BIDMC CIO, John D. Halamka, M.D., is stored in a high-performance cloud-based patient records data warehouse which is vendor-agnostic, federally-certified and able to securely support the growing number of quality reporting requirements providers face today.
“The BIDMC-MAeHC transaction during today’s event was a great demonstration of the Commonwealth’s new HIE infrastructure as well as the QDC’s capabilities,” said Halamka. “Now with streamlined access to the QDC, BIDMC’s reporting will be even faster and more accurate than ever before. MAeHC’s QDC has historically been one of the most trusted resources for BIDMC – reliable and safe enough for my wife’s EHR to be the first transmitted through the HIway – and we look forward to many more transactions via the state’s latest resource.”
MAeHC delivers hands-on tactical support and sustainable strategies to help providers improve healthcare delivery within their own organizations and across communities. The QDC uniquely helps MAeHC connect communities by providing a comprehensive, on-demand data warehousing solution that seamlessly extracts and aggregates data from multiple clinical systems and provides timely feedback that helps clinical teams improve overall quality.
For more information regarding the QDC, visit: http://www.maehc.org/services/quality-data-services/.
About Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and currently ranks third in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.org.
About Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC)
The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative is a national leader in the facilitation and management of electronic health record deployment, health information exchange and quality measure reporting. MAeHC is an independent non-profit corporation with a charitable mission to improve the delivery of health care by promoting the use of health IT. Formed in 2004 as a collaboration of non-profit health care stakeholders to demonstrate the most effective ways to deploy EHRs and HIE to improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and affordability of care in Massachusetts, MAeHC now works across the United States with a wide range of physician practices, hospitals, state governments, contracting networks, management services organizations, HIE organizations, technology vendors, and consulting firms. To learn more about the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, visit www.maehc.org.