Mount Nittany Health is a regional health system serving State College, Pennsylvania, the home of Penn State University, and the surrounding counties of Centre, Mifflin, and Clinton. Its network includes Mount Nittany Medical Center, a 260-bed acute care facility; Mount Nittany Physician Group, a practice with more than 120 healthcare providers across 20 specialties, in 15 locations throughout the region; and The Foundation for Mount Nittany Medical Center, its fundraising and development entity. With a history that spans more than 100 years, Mount Nittany Health is committed to making people healthier by providing accessible, quality care.
J2’s relationship with Mount Nittany began when we helped implement the Mirth Match EMPI for a population of approximately 400,000 unique patients. Our work included configuration modifications and custom development to harmonize patient demographic data across hospital and physician group EHRs (Meditech and Allscripts). J2 developed Mirth Connect interfaces to transmit HL7 and CCD/A documents, as well as patient scheduling, data monitoring, exception reporting, and automated notifications to facilitate communication between physician groups and facilities. The scope of our engagement then grew to include integration with Mount Nittany’s Patient Portal (Influence Health) and Provider Portal (Mirth Results). J2 coordinated the development of all interfaces to Influence Health to support the Patient Portal and attain Meaningful Use 2 certification for timely patient data sharing.
These successful implementations have laid the groundwork for Mount Nittany to support bi-directional patient data sharing with neighboring regional hospitals, including Geisinger Health System and Hershey Medical Center, using the Direct messaging standard. The expanded role of Mirth Results within the Mount Nittany architecture allowed for a complete standards based HIE implementation able to interface with unlimited healthcare networks in a scalable manner.
