**Note: Missouri Health Connection is now Midwest Health Connection!
Midwest Health Connection (MHC) is a health information exchange that allows doctors, hospitals, and x-ray facilities statewide to access patient medical information quickly and securely. Providing services to thousands of physicians, 75 hospitals and more than 350 clinics in Missouri and neighboring states, MHC alerts providers electronically about important patient events and supports the exchange of continuity of care documents (CCDs). MHC processes more than 250,000 transactions per day to help healthcare providers improve efficiency and delivery high-quality, cost-effective care.
After helping MHC achieve its first several implementation milestones with HealthShare, InterSystems brought in J2 to accelerate the pace of MHC’s expansion. Under J2’s leadership, the MHC team was able to grow its roster of connected stakeholders by a factor of five in a rapid timeframe. MHC expanded its reach beyond the St. Louis metropolitan area to encompass the entire state, almost doubling the number of providers and patients served by the exchange. J2 has also enabled MHC to introduce a series of innovative new features to its ever-growing community, such as:
- Bi-directional interoperability with a broader range of EMRs that now includes Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Greenway, Iatric, Meditech, and NextGen
- Infrastructure to allow small physician practices to share CCDs with the exchange via Direct
- EMR user interface extensions that cue providers to query the exchange when there is new data available for the patient being viewed
- Increased availability of shared Epic patient data from three months to a full year
- Real-time provider notification of changes to patient consent preferences
- Retrieval of unmodified CCDs from multiple sources, instead of a single consolidated CCD
By securely exchanging continuity of care documents between providers, MHC reduces redundant medical tests and helps ensure that patients receive the appropriate care based on their medical history. MHC uses HealthShare Patient index to reliably consolidate each patient’s longitudinal record across all participating organizations, while HealthShare’s consent management capabilities ensure that each patient’s consent preference is faithfully enforced. For each new participant onboarded to the exchange, J2 has done the work to import patient records and calibrate Patient Index tuning for optimal performance.
J2 has also helped MHC leverage the HealthShare platform to enable real-time notifications that alert physicians about important events in the lives of their patients, such as hospital admissions, test results, encounters with other providers, out-of-town emergencies, and more. The result is improved operational efficiency for providers and the highest quality, most cost-effective care delivery for patients across the State of Missouri and beyond.
For more details, please download MHC’s customer profile.
