Michigan HIE Piloting EMS-Hospital Knowledge Connections

Michigan Well being Data Community Shared Providers (MiHIN) is working with a number of stakeholders on a pilot venture geared toward enhancing affected person care coordination between emergency medical providers (EMS) companies and receiving hospitals. The purpose is to ultimately roll the service out statewide.

MiHIN is Michigan’s nonprofit, state-designated well being info trade, offering affected person info to docs, clinics, federally certified well being facilities, hospitals, pharmacies, medical insurance suppliers, and public well being in Michigan. 


As MiHIN factors out, lots of America’s hospital techniques and the fireplace and ambulance providers that take care of the communities round them function in info silos, exchanging no real-time knowledge or doing so in codecs that aren’t usable by EHRs or well being info exchanges.

In a current interview with Healthcare Innovation, Jaki Porter, MiHIN’s chief working officer, described the partnership with Past Lucid Applied sciences, and the pilot with Studying Emergency Unit and Hillsdale Hospital. The purpose is to have seamless communication between ambulances and hospitals to get rid of delays and streamline affected person handoff.

Immediately, she stated, many of the info that EMS staffers accumulate is simply handed over at any time when the affected person will get to the hospital. Typically it’s written down, generally it is verbal. Lots of occasions it is not communicated in order that the hospital can put together earlier than the affected person arrives.

For the method to develop into digital, most hospitals require a continuity of care doc (CCD), however the info that’s popping out of the EMS system at present just isn’t in a CCD format, so the hospitals aren’t capable of ingest it. Past Lucid is taking that info and changing it right into a CCD, and MiHIN is working with them intently to be sure that the information is not lacking, that it’s in the appropriate locations and that it is sensible to emergency division clinicians, Porter stated. “Now that we will really get it into the CCD format, we will ship it on to the hospital in preparation for the affected person arrival. They’ll really see what’s taking place with the affected person and pull up any historic info by way of our community, in order that they could know what different drugs the affected person may be on,” she defined. 

Moreover, she stated, the EMS employees would really like to have the ability to enhance care on their facet by discovering out the ultimate prognosis. That may assist them perceive in the event that they handled the affected person appropriately. With this new partnership, they may be capable of see a really restricted knowledge set to grasp what the ultimate prognosis was. 

Messages are already flowing between Studying Emergency Unit and Hillsdale. Hillsdale is working with its EHR vendor to work out some points in studying the messages. The second part, which entails closing the loop and sending info again to the EMS groups, is being constructed out now. 

The purpose is to roll this out statewide ultimately. “We have already got a second location that’s interested by taking part,” Porter stated. “The primary piece, in fact, is attempting to determine which hospitals are open to it. Most of them often are — no matter knowledge they’ll get to have the ability to put together them, they’re often able to do it. However simply getting them to speculate the time to be sure that their EMR can get the information ingested and that it is readable is the second piece.”

A number of different teams — just like the State of Michigan and a number of the payers — are interested by ensuring that that knowledge is definitely making it to the place it must be, Porter stated, including that this might additionally assist EMS to submit their claims on to insurance coverage, which is commonly extra of a guide or fax course of in the present day.

Porter stated that Past Lucid has labored with a number of different locations throughout the nation to start these conversations, “however I feel that is their first pilot to really get the information out and route it to the place it must go.”