Direct information where providers need it, when they need it.
The ONC Direct Project is now actively working for clinicians and their patients in the Hudson Valley
Launched in March 2010 as a part of the federal government's Nationwide Health Information Network, the Direct Project was created to specify a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to known, trusted recipients over the Internet. This supports the Affordable Care Act’s Meaningful Use requirements -- a set of standards and best practices adopted by the ONC to ensure health care providers implement electronic health records appropriately.
MedAllies, an organizations that is part of the Hudson Valley Initiative, is a health information service provider that was tapped to be among the first pilot sites selected for Direct Project.
MedAllies has fully engaged clinicians throughout the Hudson Valley and their disparate EHR vendor partners to create a Direct Project that will push critical clinical information across EHR systems to support care coordination and transitions of care, in a manner that is completely consistent with the clinicians’ established EHR workflows. The project will focus on common care transition episodes:
· patient discharge from hospital back to their primary care physician); and
· a consultation request from a PCP to a specialist, then the clinical consultation from the specialist back to the PCP.
The clinical sites involved include Albany Medical Center, Asthma and Allergy Associates of Westchester, Community Care Physicians, Health Quest System (Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Putnam Hospital Center and Northern Dutchess Hospital), Institute for Family Health, Scarsdale Medical Group, LLP; and their EHR vendor partners: Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Greenway, NextGen and Siemens.
MedAllies anticipates providing a national network capable of supporting interoperability of all physicians using certified EHR systems by the end of 2011.
Feb 17, 2011 2:40 PM