Michigan HIE Piloting EMS-Hospital Information Connections

Michigan Well being Data Community Shared Providers (MiHIN) is working with a number of stakeholders on a pilot venture geared toward enhancing affected person care coordination between emergency medical companies (EMS) companies and receiving hospitals. The aim is to ultimately roll the service out statewide.

MiHIN is Michigan’s nonprofit, state-designated well being info alternate, offering affected person info to medical doctors, clinics, federally certified well being facilities, hospitals, pharmacies, medical health insurance suppliers, and public well being in Michigan. 


As MiHIN factors out, lots of America’s hospital techniques and the hearth and ambulance companies that look after the communities round them function in info silos, exchanging no real-time information or doing so in codecs that aren’t usable by EHRs or well being info exchanges.

In a current interview with Healthcare Innovation, Jaki Porter, MiHIN’s chief working officer, described the partnership with Past Lucid Applied sciences, and the pilot with Studying Emergency Unit and Hillsdale Hospital. The aim is to have seamless communication between ambulances and hospitals to eradicate delays and streamline affected person handoff.

Right now, she stated, many of the info that EMS staffers accumulate is simply handed over at any time when the affected person will get to the hospital. Generally it’s written down, generally it is verbal. Plenty of occasions it isn’t communicated in order that the hospital can put together earlier than the affected person arrives.

For the method to develop into digital, most hospitals require a continuity of care doc (CCD), however the info that’s popping out of the EMS system presently just isn’t in a CCD format, so the hospitals aren’t capable of ingest it. Past Lucid is taking that info and changing it right into a CCD, and MiHIN is working with them intently to make it possible for the information is not lacking, that it’s in the correct locations and that it is smart to emergency division clinicians, Porter stated. “Now that we are able to truly get it into the CCD format, we are able to ship it on to the hospital in preparation for the affected person arrival. They will truly see what’s taking place with the affected person and pull up any historic info via our community, in order that they could know what different drugs the affected person is likely to be on,” she defined. 

Moreover, she stated, the EMS employees would really like to have the ability to enhance care on their facet by discovering out the ultimate analysis. That can assist them perceive in the event that they handled the affected person accurately. With this new partnership, they may be capable of see a really restricted information set to grasp what the ultimate analysis was. 

Messages are already flowing between Studying Emergency Unit and Hillsdale. Hillsdale is working with its EHR vendor to work out some points in studying the messages. The second section, which entails closing the loop and sending info again to the EMS groups, is being constructed out now. 

The aim is to roll this out statewide ultimately. “We have already got a second location that’s inquisitive about taking part,” Porter stated. “The primary piece, in fact, is attempting to determine which hospitals are open to it. Most of them normally are — no matter information they’ll get to have the ability to put together them, they’re normally able to do it. However simply getting them to speculate the time to make it possible for their EMR can get the information ingested and that it is readable is the second piece.”

A number of different teams — just like the State of Michigan and a few of the payers — are inquisitive about ensuring that that information is definitely making it to the place it must be, Porter stated, including that this might additionally assist EMS to submit their claims on to insurance coverage, which is usually extra of a handbook or fax course of as we speak.

Porter stated that Past Lucid has labored with a number of different locations throughout the nation to start these conversations, “however I believe that is their first pilot to really get the information out and route it to the place it must go.”