Healthcare Innovative Solutions and MOSS collaborate to build Health Information Exchanges

Nov 13 2009

Healthcare Innovative Solutions, a full-service clinical consulting firm, today announced a partnership with Misys Open Source Solutions (MOSS), a division of Misys plc, to provide the healthcare community with the consultancy services and open source technology necessary to build Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) -- technological infrastructures that enable the exchange of health information across disparate systems.

“HIEs are important because they provide the healthcare community with immediate access to patient data coming from many different sources—like labs, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, radiology centers, and payers—giving healthcare providers the essential information to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare in America today,” said Tim Elwell, Vice President of Misys Open Source Solutions–Healthcare.

“A close examination of the ARRA funding and resulting healthcare provider incentive payments also places the need to exchange patient information between individual providers and institutions at a critical level. Health Information Exchanges will help communities demonstrate the forthcoming ‘meaningful use’ requirements,” Elwell continued.

HIEs are an essential component in President Obama’s plan to provide access to an electronic health record (EHR) for all US citizens by 2014. Without a way to transfer records electronically, the efficiencies, cost savings, and improved patient care will never be realized. HIEs make the transfer of the electronic records possible.

“We’ve been working with hospitals eager to deploy a Health Information Exchange,” said Daniela Mahoney, RN, President and CEO of Healthcare Innovative Solutions, who decided that a partnership with MOSS was an excellent business decision after learning how effective the technology is in helping to solve interoperability problems. Mahoney was also impressed by the demonstrated progress MOSS has achieved in building an HIE at Hartford HealthCare.

“Misys’ open source technology, combined with our strategic planning and technical implementation expertise, will take Health Information Exchange to a new level by providing lower cost and more efficient implementations,” Mahoney concluded.

She was also pleased that MOSS uses the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) standards-based profiles approach to developing HIEs, mandated by the Office for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

“Collaboration is the key to success in improving healthcare delivery and should be very much a part of the way we develop software. IHE profiles built using open source development is one of the keys that will unlock the problem of interoperability, while substantially reducing the cost of software for the healthcare community. We invite the healthcare software community to join in on the effort,” concluded Elwell.