The North Carolina Health Information Exchange Authority (NC HIEA) was created in 2015 to oversee and administer the NC Health Information Exchange Network. It is a state entity that resides in the Data Division/Government Data Analytics Center of the NC Department of Information Technology.
The NC HIEA operates North Carolina’s health information exchange and NC HealthConnex. Its mission is to “connect health care providers to safely and securely share health information through a trusted network to improve health care quality and outcomes for North Carolinians.”
In conjunction with analytics partner SAS, NC HIEA decided to move to a new, modernized HIE platform. The organization chose J2 Interactive as its integration partner for HealthShare from InterSystems.
Moving to HealthShare promised:
- A robust event notification framework
- Improved ability to filter sensitive data
- Enhanced entity resolution
- Better data quality for improved analytics
- Improved data presentation to clinicians at the point-of-care
- More efficient participant onboarding
- More complete audit logs
- Meaningful Use Stage 3 reporting
NC HIEA needed to preserve the existing functionality of its legacy platform. All in-place data and inbound feeds, including participant connections, had to be migrated to HealthShare. Where possible, J2 leveraged already-owned technology to back-load over three years’ worth of data was into HealthShare. J2 also worked with SAS to recreate existing reports.
J2 and SAS completed the transition with near-zero downtime and no disruption to ongoing participant onboarding efforts.
As a further requirement, NC HIEA needed an improved portal utility and user experience. J2 customized the functional areas of the portal, including the: login page, patient search, clinician portal, clinical viewer, clinical message center, and patient summary report.
J2 Interactive continues to work with NC HIEA and SAS to build a flexible, scalable, extensible platform that can grow and support new and innovative service offerings in the future.
