Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange

Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 19:47

Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange

- one of the oldest and most advanced multi-stakeholder health information exchanges in the country. The clinical network connects a large IPA, two local hospitals, several County Health Clinics, County Detention, Mental Health, seven national and local reference labs, five imaging centers and several safety net clinics. More than 1.2 million web transactions occur each month on the HIE and more than 120,000 clinical documents consisting of lab results, electronic prescriptions, electronic refill requests, pre-treatment authorizations, orders, referrals, consult letters, H&P, radiology reports and transcribed documents are exchanged.
The exchange is open to any authorized healthcare stakeholder inside Santa Cruz County.

Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County, a California-based independent physician organization and the lead participant in the Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange, has implemented a community-wide virtual health record for its physicians.

PMG deployed the Elysium Virtual Health Record from the San Jose, Calif.-based Axolotl Corporation to its 300 physicians, linking them to patient data at the point of care. “We are excited to have taken our Elysium implementation to the next level,” said Bill Beighe, chief information officer of PMG. “We have been using Axolotl’s solutions to exchange clinical information between disparate systems for the last 13 years. With a single click, extended patient information is accessible and displayed like a patient chart.”

The virtual health record provides PMG physicians with a comprehensive view of the patient, allowing them to electronically locate, connect to and review a holistic patient chart that is drawn from data in multiple healthcare systems. Patient data is assembled using a record locator service to create a complete electronic health record without commingling data from disparate sources. Physicians may also select specific data from a patient’s health record and download it to their EMR or EMR Lite application.