Eastern Massachusetts Healthcare Initiative (EMHI)
From MAHealthIT
Eastern Massachusetts Healthcare Initiative (EMHI)
Overview:
On May 30, 2006, approximately 25 leaders from the Boston area’s major teaching hospitals, provider groups, health plans, and universities met to explore how they might work together to create a high performance health system in Eastern Massachusetts. The group discussed a shared vision that would guide such an undertaking, as well as a possible business case for working together, and endorsed the formation of a structure for the effort, named the Eastern Massachusetts Healthcare Initiative (EMHI).
After a planning process, the EMHI Steering Committee met in early 2007 to endorse recommendations for three concrete initial projects, as well as a plan for continuing EMHI’s project-based structure for implementation of these initial projects. This full set of recommendations and requirements for moving forward was approved by the EMHI Executive Committee on April 6, 2007. The three project areas are: promoting health IT interoperability; eliminating preventable hospital-acquired infections; and promoting increased efficiency through variation analysis and collaborative action.
Summary of IT Interoperability Project:
In 2008, EMHI endorsed a strategic plan developed for it by the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC).
This strategic plan identified two areas showing the most promise for collaborative success:
- Improving handoffs between providers through electronic clinical messaging services to automate the process of sending clinical information, such as discharge summaries and test results, from one EMHI organization to another, with a long-term goal of sending this information from EMHI organizations to referring physicians, specialists, and other next providers of care.
- Improving the handling of medication information by using e-prescribing to enable electronic prescription fulfillment routing, formulary enforcement, and medication reconciliation capabilities by EMHI organizations. After discussion, the Executive Committee decided that the clinical messaging initiative was more fitting for a collaborative effort.
EMHI then entered into a scoping phase, assisted by Computer Science Corporation (CSC). This phase set out to determine the readiness of each EMHI organization to implement clinical messaging, and to estimate costs related to implementation.
In Spring 2009, the Executive Committee voted to enter into a planning phase, which is now nearing completion. This phase has consisted of gathering information needed in order to go forward with full implementation of health information exchange to achieve “meaningful use” as defined by the federal government. Issues include: identifying use cases; developing an implementation guide and data architecture requirements; and addressing business and operational expectations on security, access, and maintaining a provider directory. EMHI established workgroups to assist in addressing these issues, which are overseen by the project Advisory Committee. Each workgroup is close to finalizing recommendations, as well as refined cost estimates for each EMHI organization.
