Harrison Medical Center Deploys GE Healthcare’s eHealth Information Exchange

Harrison Medical Center announced today that its healthcare community is now operational with GE Healthcare’s bi-directional, industry standards-based eHealth Information Exchange. Founded in 1918 and serving more than 640,000 people on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, Harrison Medical Center is the region’s busiest medical center.

Adar Palis, Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Harrison Medical Center, explains, "Working with GE to implement a Health Information Exchange (HIE) supports our ‘Vision 2015’ strategic priorities around physician and provider alignment, operations redesign, and cultural transformation. GE’s HIE platform is helping us to improve the quality and efficiency of the care our clinician community provides our patients.”

Each year, Harrison Medical Center supports 75,000 Emergency Department visits, 17,000 in-patient visits and 195,000 outpatient visits across its five locations. Having made the technology transition to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) between 2008 and 2010, Harrison turned to GE’s eHealth Solutions for the next phase of information technology leadership. Its goal was to enable information sharing and clinical collaboration across facilities with 415 physicians using multiple, different EMR systems, which could not readily exchange needed clinical data.

The eHealth Information Exchange is now live, allowing physicians to search and view patient documents such as history and physicals, lab and pathology reports from within their EMR workflow. GE’s HIE solution supports GE Healthcare’s own Centricity® EMR, used by Harrison’s affiliated physicians, as well as non-GE clinical software products.

Harrison is using MatchMetrix EMPI, developed by NextGate®, for matching and linking patient information in the absence of a common identifier, allowing providers to achieve a single view of patients. NextGate’s EMPI uses optimized matching algorithms to identify, index, and resolve related patient records spread over different applications and disparate systems. GE Healthcare and NextGate are working together at numerous customer sites in addition to Harrison.

Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare’s eHealth Solutions adds, "Our commitment to Harrison Medical Center is to help them meet near-term goals for their Health Information Exchange and to provide innovative solutions that help Harrison leverage its HIE investment to enhance care team coordination, patient engagement, and chronic disease management as the center grows.”

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