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Background & Problem Summary

Exchanging and aggregating patient data from different systems throughout the community can be challenging. In the early stages of pre-interoperability, healthcare organizations collected clinical data from across the community through faxes and multiple paper care documents. With little time to search through multiple documents to find needed patient data, providers were faced with making decisions based on an incomplete picture of a patient’s health status, which can lead to less effective care, duplicative tests and unnecessary costs. Today, electronic health records (EHR) applications can now electronically exchange patient information, but the capabilities and supported data exchange protocols differ between EHR vendors, which still often leaves providers with an incomplete picture of a patient’s health status. Community Interchange takes the complexity out of data exchange and bridges the gaps between data protocols and EHR solutions, so providers can quickly and easily find the right patient data at the right time, and have it delivered seamlessly into their workflows.

Application Overview

Eliminate the complexity of continuity of care document (CCD) exchange and empower clinicians with the ability to receive patient information from multiple sources seamlessly into their workflows.

Community Interchange bridges the communication gaps between differing technologies through a propriety set of interrelated technologies, so providers can find the right patient data at the right time, quickly and easily. Through the use of bi-directional queries, it aggregates, normalizes and deduplicates data from multiple systems across the community, to create one comprehensive longitudinal patient CCD making it easy and efficient for providers to review a patient’s health history. Community Interchange revolutionizes provider workflows, by minimizing the time spent on tracking down patient records, so providers can spend more time focused on delivering better patient care.

Benefits and Features

Eliminates the complexity of sharing CCDs

Utilizes protocol bridging technology to break down the technology barriers between different EHR systems across the community to enable true system interoperability.

Streamlines access to multiple data sources with one single click

Supports bi-directional queries between networks with a “one to many” connectivity approach to allow providers to query multiple community sources simultaneously when looking for available information about their patients.

Improve quality of care

Provides a comprehensive view of a patient’s health history from all sources across the community, so providers will spend less time tracking down patient records and more time focused on delivering better care to patients.

Unlocks data and turns it into a strategic asset

Aggregates, normalizes and deduplicates data from multiple systems, records, and CCDs to create a single, comprehensive, longitudinal CCD that can be used for delivering patient care or for analytic purposes.

Improves care coordination and delivers key information for care transitions

Gives providers access to both acute care and ambulatory patient information, aggregated from multiple systems from across the community, to help facilitate seamless transitions of care.

Use Cases

  • A public health organization and a private, nonprofit health system share patients and want to share their clinical data so community providers have access to comprehensive patient information. Unfortunately, the two organizations use different technology systems that are unable to communicate. Community Interchange was deployed to bridge the gap between these two networks and enabled the two health care organizations to share clinical information through bi-directional queries, effectively enhancing the capabilities of both organizations.
  • A physician’s network utilizes Community Interchange’s protocol to bridge their technology and provide network physicians the ability to view a patient’s health history from a variety of different data sources from within their own EMR. With comprehensive data, providers are able to close gaps in their patient records and provide quality care.
  • A new patient presents for care, and the specialist provider leverages Community Interchange to query all available community sources and view a complete clinical history for the new patient; to avoid duplicate testing and improve the quality of care.
  • A clinical analyst previously relied on manual processes to aggregate and standardize patient health histories from multiple sources across the community in order to perform analytic activities. With Community Interchange, these manual processes are eliminated and gaps in the data are minimized, ultimately improving the quality of the data.

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