September 2021 eNewsletter

The summer is quickly slipping by, and we want to share with you our next edition of the SYNCRONYS eNewsletter.  We are excited to provide you the latest information as it relates to the Health Information Exchange for New Mexico as well as taking a look at recent information across the country.

Use Cases

As many HIEs across the country are developing partnerships to expand beyond the patient longitudinal record, at SYNCRONYS we have teamed up with our strategic partners to stack high value use cases onto the clinical portal platform.  In this issue we bring you a brief overview of Use Cases with Collective Medical and highlight the benefits to you and your organization.  Stay tuned for information on our additional Use Cases in the next eNewletter.

Substance Use Disorder Management

• With this program, you will have better awareness and improved workflows for treating patients suffering from substance use disorder (SUD).
• It includes SUD-related reports and notifications to alert you to critical information about your patients with SUD, supporting patient transitions to Medication Assisted Treatment facilities, and enhanced care for infants w/ Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (Substance Exposed Infants).
• You can get all features of this use case that are applicable to your facility when you subscribe to SYNCRONYS, the New Mexico HIE.
• This use case is applicable to hospitals and clinics that provide SUD services including Medication Assisted Treatment facilities.
• When it comes to SUD services, health care providers often have questions about patient consent for information sharing, and how this works with laws that protect the confidentiality of SUD treatment records. This program is compliant with state and federal law. We can give you more information about how this works if you’d like to know more.

Emergency Department Optimization

• This program will drive workplace safety and improved decision-making in the emergency department (ED), delivering relevant patient-specific alerts and information to hospitals.
• Your Emergency Department probably already uses Collective Medical (also known as “Edie”), the ED optimization is available when you subscribe to SYNCRONYS’ HIE.
• We have new features for Emergency Departments that will be available to you with no additional IT requirements if you are already on the Collective Medical network. These include notifications about patients with multi drug-resistant organisms, potential housing insecurity, recent imaging studies, among other features.
• Emergency Departments can get all features of this use case when you subscribe to SYNCRONYS, the New Mexico HIE.

 Transitions of Care Management

• Transitions of Care Management supports a smoother care transition (from the hospital to post-acute care) for patients and providers by providing alerts and information related to transition events such as patient discharges and potential readmissions.
• Features include notifications in your workflow based on criteria such as inpatient or SNF discharge within the last 30 days. It also includes a patient activity page for hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) that allows you to monitor patient length of stay, readmission risk, and other critical information.
• You can get all features of this use case that are applicable to your facility when you subscribe to SYNCRONYS, the New Mexico HIE.
• This use case is applicable to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and ambulatory clinics.

Collaboration and Coordination of Mental Health

• Our Mental Health program will give you awareness of and enable care collaboration for patients with mental health needs across both acute and ambulatory settings, through care insights and notifications.
• You will have access to mental health notifications at the point of care with important and relevant patient information, as well as mental health reports, and ability to identify patients with an Emergency Department “encounter of interest” such as a history of suicide or self-harm.
• You can get all features of this use case that are applicable to your facility when you subscribe to SYNCRONYS, the New Mexico HIE.
• This use case is applicable to hospitals and clinics that provide mental health services.
• When it comes to mental health services, health care providers often have questions about patient consent for information sharing. Our consent program is compliant with state and federal law, facilitating better patient care through collaboration without compromising patient privacy. We can give you more information about how this works if you’d like to know more.

Conditions of Participation

• There are new federal rules for participation in the Medicare program. (CMS Interoperability and Patient Access rule, also known as CMS-9115-F). These update the existing conditions of participation to require hospitals—including psychiatric hospitals and critical access hospitals—to send electronic patient event notifications of a patient’s admission, discharge, and/or transfer (ADT) to other healthcare facilities or to community providers or practitioners.
• Hospitals can either send these electronic patient event notifications themselves, which can be complicated, or use an intermediary, like SYNCRONYS and Collective Medical, to perform these functions.
• The current expectation was for hospitals to have a solution by May 2021.
• The New Mexico Solution integrates with the hospital EHR to automatically deliver required event notifications to identified primary care and post-acute providers—without the need to change existing workflows.
• Your hospital can become compliant with these new federal requirements by subscribing to SYNCRONYS, the New Mexico HIE.

 

SYNCRONYS provides the following Use Cases along with our valued partners.

Substance Use Disorder	Collective Medical
Emergency Department Optimization	Collective Medical
Transitions of Care Management	Collective Medical
Collaboration and Coordination of Mental Health	Collective Medical
Conditions of Participation	Collective Medical
HCV	Rhodes
Diagnostic Images	eHealth Technology
Advance Directive and MOST Forms	Vynca
Coordinate	Orion

As we look at news around the nation, we wanted to share the following from EHR Intelligence (Hannah Nelson).

Below is an excerpt on How HIEs Help Hit Healthcare Compliance, Cost Savings Goals – view the full article here:

https://ehrintelligence.com/news/how-hies-help-hit-healthcare-compliance-cost-savings-goals

Health information exchanges could be the key to solving interoperability challenges and achieving a nationwide infrastructure of health data exchange.

August 13, 2021 – Widespread interoperability for health information exchange (HIE) could revolutionize the medical industry through enhanced care coordination, diminished clinician burnout, and increased access to data for medical research and analytics.

However, making healthcare data interoperable across a nation of hundreds of thousands of disparate care organizations is no easy feat. HIEs may help simplify the goal of national interoperability.

An HIE is an organization that helps disparate providers electronically share patient data to deliver more coordinated, patient-centered care.

Statewide and regional HIEs that facilitate standardized data exchange between care organizations should make national interoperability more attainable, as they help break down the challenge into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Current regulations aim to standardize patient data exchange for national interoperability but complying with these regulations can be costly and time-consuming if a care organization tackles them on their own. HIEs can provide massive cost-savings to care organizations through shared health IT services.

COMPLIANCE WITH THE CMS INTEROPERABILITY AND PATIENT ACCESS FINAL RULE

The CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule requires payer and provider organizations to demonstrate that their EHR system can send admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) to all applicable post-acute care providers through the ADT messaging standard. This includes primary care practitioners and groups, and other practitioners and groups identified by the patient as primarily responsible for her care.

Paul Wilder, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance, noted in a recent EHRIntelligence interview that compliance with the ADT messaging standard may come with challenges, as contact information for post-acute care providers is not common within EHR systems.

“Providers might have an entry somewhere of the patient’s primary care provider, but they’re actually not sure exactly how to get the message to them, or if the PCP wants it,” he told EHRIntelligence in an interview.

A solution –

Direct Secure Messaging – The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has approved the Direct Standard, which lays the foundation for direct secure messaging, as a national standard for health data exchange.

Direct Secure Messaging is a widely adopted procedure that allows individuals to digitally send authenticated, encrypted health data to trusted recipients.

Reasons to use Direct Secure Messaging (DSM) (powered by Orion Health) with SYNCRONYS

• Use to send patient referrals and other transitions of care/summary of care records
• Send and receive Billing and Coding inquiries
• Share diagnostic and test results
• Utilize coordination of care, e.g., care plans
• Use shared mailboxes and care management teams
• Meets CMS requirements

 

We hope you enjoyed the September edition of the SYNCRONYS eNewsletter, if you would like more information about our Use Cases, DSM, or any other feature SYNCRONYS provides, please contact us at info@syncronys.org, and our website is always open at syncronys.org.