New York eHealth Collaborative Selects InterSystems HealthShare

InterSystems Corporation announced that the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) has chosen InterSystems HealthShare™ as the technology foundation for health information exchange (HIE) for the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY).

Connected Care Across New York State
"We are charged with the development and implementation of SHIN-NY in order to connect the many different stakeholders around the state and to facilitate communication of vital health information," said David Whitlinger, Executive Director at NYeC. "HealthShare provides the comprehensive set of advanced features that are essential to achieve our core interoperability goals. It enables us to meet our immediate needs for intelligent aggregation and exchange of data and, simultaneously, establishes a platform on which richer solutions can be developed.

"In addition, HealthShare is currently used by multiple regional health information organizations (RHIOs) in New York," Whitlinger said. He noted that HealthShare is the strategic platform underlying the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange (BHIX), a RHIO that developed the reference system for the NYeC initiative.

Leveraging Current Investments
NYeC will implement a set of core services that will be used by SHIN-NY participants to exchange information across organizational boundaries. "This approach takes into account existing networks and leverages the investments already made by setting up a common foundation for using the SHIN-NY," Whitlinger said. The highest priority clinical functions identified for support by SHIN-NY are delivery of pertinent clinical patient information to healthcare providers; public health reporting; and enhanced care delivery.

More than $300 million in federal and state funds have been allocated to accelerate HIE and the use of health information technology in New York over the next three years. "NYeC's success will depend on its use of federal and state grant dollars to create a sustainable HIE infrastructure that supports widespread initiatives to improve healthcare quality and reduce healthcare costs," Whitlinger said. "We look forward to working closely with InterSystems to develop and deploy the HealthShare-based infrastructure that will be critical to providing easy, secure access to a single, comprehensive medical record for each patient and to enabling our success."

"InterSystems HealthShare supports a set of standards and protocols that will enable sharing of critical health information across New York and will provide an HIE model for national initiatives," said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems Vice President of Strategic Planning. "In addition, HealthShare includes Active Analytics technology that enables sophisticated patient- and population-level analysis as well as InterSystems' iKnow technology that makes it possible to access and unlock the critical unstructured data—clinical notes are a good example—that comprise the majority of information in a patient record. We're very pleased to provide the platform to support the SHIN-NY initiatives and appreciate the opportunity to work in partnership with NYeC on this vital healthcare program."