Hartford Hospital, NextGate collaborate in HIE implementation and work-flow integration project

Feb 28 2010

HIMSS Conference & Exhibition Booth 7470

“When Stephan O'Neill first approached me for help in setting up an EMPI solution some 15 years ago, almost nobody else even knew what it was all about”

Hartford Hospital, one of the nation’s “Most Wired” hospitals, is collaborating with NextGate in a Health Information Exchange (HIE) implementation and a separate work-flow integration project. With an aim to improve patient care, both initiatives rely on NextGate's MatchMetrix indexing solution to uniquely identify a patient across multiple encounters and locations within the Hartford healthcare system and beyond.

“Being able to identify a patient quickly and accurately is crucial to our ability to provide high quality of care,” said Stephan O’Neill, Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Information Services, Hartford Hospital. “The NextGate indexing software was easily integrated with our growing HIE infrastructure to help us extract the full value from our electronic medical records (EMRs). It is further allowing us to establish EMR connections with the wider community of physicians in Connecticut.”

Unique Patient Identities

Based on open source technologies, MatchMetrix is rapidly implemented and cost-effective and enables Hartford Hospital and its partners to maintain their current systems and processes. It includes a full management suite to assist in resolving patient identity issues and complies with the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Patient Identifier Cross-Referencing (PIX) and Patient Demographics Query (PDQ) protocols.

“When Stephan O'Neill first approached me for help in setting up an EMPI solution some 15 years ago, almost nobody else even knew what it was all about,” said Andy Aroditis, Chief Executive Officer of NextGate. “Under Stephan’s leadership, Hartford Hospital has remained at the forefront of EMPI implementation and is now a great model of sensible information technology use for healthcare organizations around the world. We are honored to work with an institution that really strives to use technology wisely and safely. Plus, it feels very good to know that our technology is being used to help health care professionals enhance quality care for patients.”

At Hartford Hospital, the PIX protocol is vital to the institution-wide HIE now being implemented. With MatchMetrix at its core, this PIX protocol allows the system to uniquely identify an individual patient in order that all of their data from multiple HIE sites can then be accurately associated with them.

MatchMetrix also provides unique patient identities for Hartford Hospital’s Physician Electronic Medical Records (EMR) project. Through this project, the hospital is collaborating to install EMR technology solutions in physician’s offices in order to share patient admission, discharge, and transfer data via a central MatchMetrix implementation.