The Golden Spike Part 1

Tomorrow at 11am, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will drive the Golden Spike into the Statewide Healthcare Information Exchange, the MassHIway, by sending a record between an Eastern Massachusetts hospital and a Western Massachusetts hospital.

We'll then commence transactions that demonstrate:

ACO to ACO transmission - two large healthcare systems breaking down silos and exchanging lifetime summary records for care coordination

Provider to Registry transmission  - EHR data sent to a third party for computation of quality and performance metrics

Provider to Plan transmission - EHR encounter data sent from a provider organizations to a payer for care management

Pediatric Care Coordination - EHR transmission between a community provider and a tertiary referral hospital

Suburban to Urban Specialist referral - A PCP at a community site sends referral data to an urban specialist, electronically closing the loop between the two

These transactions will flow over the production state HIE and the production EHRs of

Partners Healthcare
Baystate Health
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Mass eHealth Collaborative
Tufts Medical Center
Network Health
Childrens Hospital Boston
Atrius Health
Vanguard Health Systems New England

Vendors involved include Orion, Cerner, Siemens, Epic, Meditech and eClinicalWorks as well as the home built systems Partners' LMR and BIDMC's webOMR.

Tomorrow I'll let you know how it went.

If all goes well, no patient will again be told that the only information highway in Massachusetts is the turnpike!