Hartford Hospital has collaborated with NextGate for 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 identify a patient across multiple encounters and locations within the Hartford healthcare system and beyond.
At Hartford Hospital, the PIX protocol is vital to the institution-wide HIE being implemented. With MatchMetrix at its core, the 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 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.
Based on open source technologies, MatchMetrix has been 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.
Andy Aroditis, chief executive officer of NextGate, said: “Under Stephan’s leadership, Hartford Hospital has remained at the forefront of EMPI implementation and is 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 good to know that our technology is being used to help health care professionals enhance quality care for patients.”
Stephan Neill, chief information officer and vice president of information services at Hartford Hospital, said: “Being able to identify a patient quickly and accurately is crucial to our ability to provide high quality of care. 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.”