A growing number of clinicians across Western New York have one click access to diagnostic quality images for their patients, right from their existing workflow. Patients no longer need to pick up and transport CDs and physicians no longer need to call for images or log in to multiple systems. HEALTHeLINK enables secure, easy access to all available patient data—improving the delivery of services and patient safety.
HEALTHeLINK™, the Western New York Clinical Information Exchange (WNYCIE), is a collaborative consortium that was created to improve the quality and delivery of care and attempt to mitigate the skyrocketing cost of the health care system. Their Health Information Exchange (HIE) connects hospitals, payers, and over 5000 (growing daily) physicians including imaging providers, across eight counties in Western New York.
HEALTHeLINK recognized the importance of including imaging as part of their comprehensive virtual health record system. Clinicians across the region are able to securely and easily access patient reports, prescriptions, allergies, encounter notes, discharge summaries—the list goes on, from all data sources connected to HEALTHeLINK.
eHealth Connect Image Exchange provides:
- Clinicians with one click access to images
- Emergent exams, available prior to report
- Reduced costs from production, transporting and loading of images from physical media
- Improved patient safety
- Eliminated duplicate exams
Executive Director for HEALTHeLINK
Realizing that diagnostic imaging is costing the industry nearly $365 billion and seeing patients in their own community having to go in for redundant exams due to image inaccessibility, when and where it is needed — HEALTHeLINK started working with eHealth Technologies™, to implement eHealth Connect® Image Exchange.
“We surveyed community image providers and specialists,” shared Dan Porreca, Executive Director for HEALTHeLINK. “They all saw imaging as something that would be significant, especially in surgery and emergent situations including trauma cases.”
eHealth Connect Image Exchange provides single click access to any diagnostic quality image within a hospital or HIE network, right from the context of a patient’s record in the clinicians’ EHR or HIE solution. Clinicians no longer need to call image providers to request data nor log into multiple systems to find them—they will be able to access all images through HEALTHeLINK. Thirty imaging providers in total have been connected to HEALTHeLINK since the first year of deployment.
HEALTHeLINK queries their PACS systems across the network for images requested. Images completed in the last thirty days are immediately available with older images available within a few minutes. Common problems of inaccessible images due to lost images and films, nonviewable CDs and large file transfers are a thing of the past. In addition, imaging providers will save on the high costs of creating CDs for shipment or transporting by the patient. On average, the HEALTHeLINK community transfers more than 10,000 imaging studies per month and over 700 transfers in a single day.
“Sharing images is far more cost effective for our health care community,” Porreca continued. “The eHealth Technologies team has been very positive and great to work with and implementation went smoothly—taking a cumulative of about 30 hours of our time and 8–16 hours of each data sources’ time.”
“Sharing images is far more cost effective for our health care community.”
Dan Porreca, Executive Director for HEALTHeLINK
“Sharing images is far more cost effective for our health care community.” – Dan Porreca, Executive Director for HEALTHeLINK
