Athena Health’s EMR Interface is now DHIN Certified!

Athena Health’s EMR interface recently became the latest certified by DHIN. Practices that use Athena or one of the other Certified DHIN Interfaces are able to receive information from the DHIN database directly in to their practices’ EMRs without disrupting the normal work flow, which saves considerable time and effort.

DHIN-enrolled practices currently using Athena’s EMR include:

Brandywine Family Medicine Beebe Dermatology Health Center Beebe Family Practice at Millville Beebe Family Practice in Georgetown Beebe Gastroenterology Associates Beebe Internal Medicine at Lewes Beebe Internal Medicine at Milton

Beebe Lewes Infectious and Travel Medicine Beebe Lewes Pulmonary Beebe Surgical Oncology Lewes Family Practice Beebe Cardiac Surgery Beebe ENT Facial Plastic Surgery

Vendors with a Certified DHIN Interfaces include:

ADS (Advanced Data Systems) Allscripts (Including Eclipsys) Athena Health Bizmatics/PrognoCis Cerner eCW (e-Clinical Works) GE Healthcare (Centricity) GEMMS Glenwood/Glace Greenway

Henry Schein MicroMD InfoQuest McKesson (Practice Partners and Horizon) MedPlus - Care360 NextGen Office Practicum (Connexin Software) SequelMed STI Computer Services Waiting Room Solutions

How the $4.7 Million Grant from the ONC Helped Propel DHIN Forward

The final report on the use of DHIN’s $4.7 million grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) was completed this month. The grant, awarded in 2009 for technology projects planned through 2013, enabled DHIN to advance numerous key projects that are enhancing healthcare in Delaware. The grant:

• Helped Delaware’s acute care hospitals to enroll in DHIN. All now actively participate.
• Enabled DHIN to facilitate electronic transmission of immunization information to the Delaware Division of Public Health’s registry. Manual entry of records has been reduced by nearly 50% and is expected to continue to decrease as more data senders participate.
• Supported the creation of an Event Notification System (ENS) for Medicaid Managed Care Organizations and medical practices. This service notifies providers or health insurers when a patient is released from the emergency department or an in-patient stay and helps with continuity of care. ENS is expected to greatly decrease return visits to the Emergency Department.
• Supported the implementation of the image viewing function which provides a means for a hospital to include links to images in the reports they deliver through the DHIN. Seeing the image as well as reading the report helps with decision making for continuing care.
• Helped expand access through the continuum of care by enrolling more than 80% of Delaware’s long-term care facilities.
• Enabled the electronic submission of surveillance data from Delaware hospitals to the Division of Public Health by feeding chief complaint data for emergency department visits.
• Provided the means for the exchange of newborn screening data to the Division of Public Health.
  
  

DHIN staff has been exploring other grant opportunities now that the ONC grant is completed. Look for announcements in the coming months.

Risk Analysis Completed

Best Practice Partners, a consulting practice specializing in information security, recently completed a risk analysis and assessment of the Delaware Health Information Network.

The assessment, conducted at the request of DHIN’s management and board, examined the organization’s privacy and security environment using criteria from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology as well as Federal and State laws and regulations. It was determined that there were no major areas or issues that require corrective action.

“Although we were confident our network was (and remains) secure, we asked Best Practice Partners to conduct a thorough review to determine if adjustments could be made that would enhance the privacy and security of the information we store,” said Dr. Jan Lee, DHIN CEO. “The exercise prompted several constructive discussions regarding industry best practices and will lead to additional improvements in our approach to system security.”

Best Practice Partners has a proven information security process with specific experience building successful information security programs in the healthcare industry that has strict regulatory requirements regarding protection of sensitive information. BPP also operates on a federated partnership model, drawing when necessary on the skills and expertise of outside individuals and organizations that represent Best Practices in their respective fields for the benefit of its clients. For its work with the DHIN, Best Practice Partners partnered with IT security leader, Reclamere, Inc., of Tyrone, PA.

Tech Tips Live On DHIN.org

Are you having problems printing from ProAccess, searching for a patient or adding a new user? Find answers to these, as well as other commonly asked questions, in the brand-new Tech Tips page. This is a new feature on the DHIN website, located under the 'Resources' tab, so help is always just a click away.

We will be adding additional tips from time to time, so be sure to check back frequently for updates. We hope you find this information helpful.

"The information on DHIN is so helpful to our practice. We have patients come into the office that can't remember where they had lab/radiology work done. Utilizing the DHIN system, we log onto DHIN, type in the patient's name and we can see where the patient had reports done. It really does help us from having to call around and track down that information."

Debbie McGinnes
Nurse
Bijan Sorouri, M.D., PA