Serving a metropolitan area of one million residents requires collaboration with other health systems. For Emanate Health, this means navigating a care landscape surrounded by facilities using myriad EHR vendors. Over 95% of the data Emanate Health pulls into its patient records comes from outside sources. Historically, because of a lack of interoperability, this data frequently arrived via fax — a process that could take weeks, if the information arrived at all. When it didn’t, patients who received care at other facilities were required to act as couriers for their own medical information.
“Patients with complex conditions often had to carry 300-page documents to their visits or figure out how to fax them,” said Tito Perez, corporate director of enterprise applications at Emanate Health. “Healthcare facilities may still rely on fax machines, but most patients do not. The costs and challenges associated with faxing and printing paper copies placed an unfair burden on all our patients, but especially those who were the sickest and most vulnerable.”
To bridge the gap, Emanate Health turned to MEDITECH’s national data exchange network, Traverse Exchange.
Relieving burnout with interoperability
Traverse Exchange enables MEDITECH customers across the US to share data seamlessly and securely with any EHR connected to a CMS-aligned network. Emanate Health was one of the first to deploy Traverse Exchange’s consolidated patient summary, which makes siloed, fragmented data from other care settings available to clinicians in one comprehensive view.
Unlike traditional data exchanges, the consolidated patient summary brings discrete data to Emanate Health clinicians, within their standard workflows, where it can be sorted, filtered, and applied to their decision-making, improving their satisfaction. For example, Emanate Health clinicians can now instantly view discharge summaries and imaging reports for patients who recently received care at nearby facilities, giving them a complete clinical picture without the administrative headache.
And that means clinicians who were previously exhausted from managing data are now able to focus on patient care, which is why they got into medicine in the first place.
Helping clinicians provide more holistic care
Having a consolidated view of patient records from outside facilities means clinicians at Emanate Health can provide better, more efficient care.
While caring for a patient with uncontrolled diabetes who was a challenging historian, Andrea Douglas, a physician assistant in family practice at Emanate Health, used Traverse Exchange to easily locate a recent discharge summary from another facility. She was then able to formulate a safe, effective treatment plan tailored specifically to the patient’s needs.
“If I can see when the last test was performed, I can prevent duplicate tests or I can order the appropriate follow-up,” said Douglas.
Enthusiasm for the solution has been immediate and widespread. Perez noted that when an Emergency Department physician was first shown the consolidated view, his reaction was emphatic: “I want it yesterday.”
Building partnerships with Traverse Exchange
By automating the retrieval of outside records, Traverse Exchange does much more than simply streamline workflows: It enables Emanate Health clinicians to form collaborative partnerships with their patients. In one instance, a PA quickly located labs, consults, and imaging from another healthcare system to help a patient successfully complete a complex SSI application.
Now, patients can focus on healing rather than handling paperwork.
“Patients feel they are important because I’m taking the time to look into their previous health data,” said Douglas. “Traverse Exchange is valuable to me, and my patients feel valued.”