Noteworthy

Les Westberg

Led the development teams for the CHDR BHIE interoperability project enabling system-wide sharing of patient medical data between the VA and DoD as well as the Terminology Service Bureau ontology system

Clark Shaw

Expert in terminology technology for health information exchange, including the Military Health System’s Terminology Service Bureau and AHLTA Terminology Services

Health Information Exchange

Meeting the Challenge of Connected Healthcare

Healthcare leaders agree that interoperability is key to delivering upon the significant promise of health information technology (HIT). The challenge confronting both payers and providers is that the HIT landscape has evolved slowly over the past twenty years, defined largely by inconsistent standards, legacy systems and proprietary terminologies. Coupled with the unique security concerns inherent in exchanging individually identifiable health information, it’s clear that the industry faces significant hurdles.

Fortunately, the healthcare leadership team at Agilex has been tackling the challenges of health information exchange (HIE) for more than a decade. Utilizing their deep understanding of healthcare enterprise architecture and the nuances of structured and unstructured data exchange, they provide solutions to facilitate secure, real-time interoperability between disparate systems and across extended value chains, including:

• Agilex is playing a critical role in the development of the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) CONNECT Gateway.
• We are working with the Military Health System and the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve continuity of care for wounded warriors via unfettered information sharing between these two healthcare providers.
• Agilex is developing the shared infrastructure that a consortium of Blue Cross/Blue Shield providers will use to securely exchange health information over a service area spanning eleven states.

Open, Standards-Based Solutions for Health Information Exchange

With the NHIN interface emerging as a de facto standard for HIE, many of our solutions capitalize on the open source NHIN CONNECT Gateway as this reduces upfront and sustainment costs, accelerates deployment, and ensures maximum interoperability. Using this reference model, we are able to provide organizations with turnkey solutions that deliver out-of-the-box all of the capabilities that they might require.

Each of our HIE solutions builds upon a standards-based enterprise service bus (ESB) for system-to-system messaging and includes a robust authorization framework for authenticating service requests in accordance with defined policies. A host of dedicated services are configured and packaged to provide needed functionality, such as record discovery, consent management, auditing and ‘psuednonymization.’ We even provide a Master Patient Index (MPI) and document repository in instances where organizations elect not to use their existing resources.

Our HIE solutions are developed using service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, meaning that each implementation can be easily configured to the unique needs of the organization and readily updated. This standards-based approach also enhances interoperability. For example, the NHIN summarized patient record (ANSI/HITSP C32) is based upon the Health Level Seven (HL7) Continuity of Care Document (CCD) specification and our HIE solutions are typically MITA compliant as well. Recognizing the heterogeneous nature of most environments, we take a vendor-neutral approach and can support legacy implementations.

Our experience in designing, deploying and managing carrier-grade implementations is unsurpassed. For example, we have developed and implemented clinical data repositories (CDR) in excess of 30 terabytes. By optimizing their CDR, healthcare leaders can maintain ‘one version of the truth’ more consistently, use structured data to facilitate enhanced interoperability, and capitalize on a powerful data warehouse for more advanced analytics.

Agilex also offers deep expertise in the area of semantic interoperability. By working to ensure interoperability between related phrases and concepts – the clinician’s patient and billing’s customer – we can further streamline and automate hospital workflow, improve patient safety and accelerate scientific discovery.