Vermont Building Health Information Exchange

Vermont Information Technology Leaders (VITL) -- a non-profit that received start-up funding from the state Legislature -- has selected GE Healthcare to provide the health information technology infrastructure for a statewide health information organization.

The Vermont Health Information Exchange will focus on the following major projects:

• A comprehensive medication history for all consenting patients that will be initially available in the emergency departments of two pilot hospitals
• A chronic care information system that will help participating caregivers manage enrolled patients with diabetes.

VITL will also focus on writing a state health information technology plan by July 2007, which will include the development of a statewide health information exchange (HIE) that will connect providers, payors and patients throughout the state of Vermont. The HIE will facilitate data exchange between multiple Vermont healthcare stakeholders, and will be structured to allow standards-based applications from additional vendors and future stakeholders to plug into the network and add to the wealth of data being shared. Additionally, through its open, standards-based architecture, VITL will enable clinicians across the state utilizing 3rd-party EMR systems to access the health information exchange.

The first project that will go live is medication history. This project will provide comprehensive medication history data compiled from payor claims history and eventually include pharmacy records. The goal is to ultimately expand the project from two pilot sites to all 15 emergency departments in the state.

Orion Health will provide its Concerto medical applications portal to review and report chronic disease data, Concerto Clinicals Disease Management application to manage and leverage that data, and the Rhapsody Integration Engine to ensure smooth communication between new and existing information management systems and partner applications. The chronic care project will leverage technology from Orion Health in conjunction with GE's Centricity electronic medical record (EMR) software to eventually save data within the Centricity EMR so that clinicians can readily view historical patient information.

"Because of its size, Vermont is an ideal state to test the health information exchange concept," said Vermont Health Commissioner Sharon Moffatt. "Our hope is that enhanced access to information will better enable providers to comprehensively diagnose and treat patients with chronic conditions."