NYC Health + Hospitals is the nation’s largest public health care delivery system. They are an integrated network of hospitals, trauma centers, neighborhood health centers, nursing homes, and post-acute care centers. They are a home care agency and a health plan, MetroPlus. The health system provides essential services to more than 1.4 million New Yorkers every year in more than 70 patient care locations and in their homes.
Using InterSystems’ Ensemble platform (now Health Connect), J2 architected and built a data integration solution that not only manages real-time feeds from over two dozen care centers but also provides critical data warehousing and reporting capabilities to HHC’s corporate division. Outbound messages from Ensemble enable HHC to share aggregate patient statistics, including demographic and diagnostic information, with outside agencies such as the New York City Department of Health, while persistent data objects within Ensemble allow HHC’s own staff to perform ad-hoc reporting and analysis across the entire HHC network. Web-based tools provide a complete online audit of the raw HL7 message traffic.
In addition to improving HHC’s ability to collate and publish its patient information both inside and outside the organization, the project laid the groundwork for several follow-on initiatives in which J2 played a key role. Outbound interfaces and web services built by J2 on top of HHC’s Ensemble data store helped to enable applications such as HHCAdvantage, which facilitates online referrals to the HHC network from out-of-network physicians. J2 also enhanced HHC’s Ensemble production with business logic that identifies and combines related ADT messages to create a comprehensive record of each discrete patient visit. And an alerts engine developed by J2 allows care providers at any of HHC’s facilities or affiliates to receive real-time notifications, triggered whenever a monitored event occurs for one of the patients to which they are subscribed.
