Labs (national, regional as well as hospital or physician office based) have traditionally struggled with getting their internal HL7 clinical data out to their immediate ordering community of physicians in an electronic manner. A LabHIN™ Health Information Network is a secure, privacy-aware health information network that is established by a Lab. The network gives the Lab the ability to distribute lab results (including accumulated lab results) through a web-based user interface, or by using bi-directional data integration/interfacing technology, depending on the parties’ capabilities. The HealthUnity LabHIN™ solution lets Labs connect to external ordering providers incrementally over time, with the ultimate goal of electronically connecting the entire community of referring providers.

The Lab Health Information Network (some refer this as the Physician outreach network) provides the ability for a Lab (national, regional, hospital based or physician office based) to connect to its ordering base of physicians over a secure network and exchange clinical information electronically. The need for such a network has been realized for many years now and there are various national, state-wide and regional efforts underway. It will help for us to summarize the problems addressed by LabHINs.

Inefficiencies leading to higher costs in today’s model

• Results distribution happens today via snail mail, faxing and other manual means (including remote printers). These operations take up valuable time and are inherently labor intensive. They are also not necessarily secure and address HIPAA privacy concerns
• One option is to provide remote printing solution. These solutions are very expensive and hard to maintain. They require replenishment of supplies. They don’t integrate with EMRs that exist today or ones that may be purchased in the near future.
• EMR systems by themselves do not solve all of the communication and collaboration problems that physicians are facing. They still have to build point-to-point interfaces to lab systems. Who pays for this? What is the ROI on these development costs? Who builds and maintains the adapters to the physician EMR systems?
• There is no proper solution for those physicians who do not have EMRs today. The nearest solution is a web portal. Those portals are good but they don’t deliver results to physicians in an integrated fashion (along with hospital data, other physician data etc). The data cannot be “imported” to EMRs at physician offices either today or in the future.
• Proliferation of point-to-point interfaces increases costs to labs involved in integrating systems in an exponential manner. These point-to-point interfaces are also very difficult to manage and support.
• Physician practices face a high barrier to adopt electronic medical record systems because those systems do not integrate with other systems other than thru expensive point-to-point interfaces.
• In the paper world, there may be multiple paper results delivered for a given accession. The physician has to sort through each of those and figure out the latest and final result set.

Quality of Care Issues

• Lab results delivery can be delayed because of fax bottlenecks. (the HU system has been shown to deliver results up to 14 hours in advance thus giving physicians greater time to react)
• The most important lab result may be sitting on the bottom of the fax
• Faxes are not able to prioritize abnormal lab results ahead of normal lab results.

Patient Experience

• Patient experience suffers as a result of the lack of information which could be leveraged to streamline operations and improve quality of care. Patient’s confidence in the system often gets diminished when they see their information is not being electronically communicated.
• Patients may have to wait much longer for follow on visits while lab results get lost sometimes repeatedly

The HealthUnity™ solution provides at the core, a set of software and services that enable secure connectivity between Labs and ordering providers. The network is built on standards which enable multiple parties to collaborate without having to build non-standard interfaces. It is also built with stringent privacy policies in place which enable tight control over both publishing as well as receiving information by involved parties.

The HealthUnity™ network consists of an ever-increasing set of services delivered on the network, which progressively takes the bar of connected collaboration to a new level. The HealthUnity™ solution addresses and resolves the problem areas discussed above.

For practices that use an electronic system for maintaining clinical information, HealthUnity provides the required set of adapters which allows bidirectional transfer of clinical information to other trusted providers. For physicians and practices that do not use electronic records, HealthUnity enables connectivity to the regional network through a client application that provides them with a pathway to adopting more sophisticated electronic systems in the future.

The HealthUnity™ network enables clinical information providers such as labs as well as radiology centers to automate the delivery of the results generated to physicians. The network takes the lab results generated at the LIS system at the lab end and delivers it to physician offices, whether or not they have an EMR system. Once a lab is enabled on our system, there is no incremental cost involved in adding every new physician to this network.

Our approach is radical yet simple. The HealthUnity solution begins with planning the network. We offer a pre-packaged plan that can be customized in a short period of time – this includes a complete legal framework for data sharing. Once this plan is done and signed off by the LabHIN initiating organization, it takes us under a day to configure the product to provide the network services to operate a LabHIN. Each member entity that joins this network can do so with a standardized implementation plan with predictable results at a predictable cost. The workflows across the LabHIN are all standardized and readily available. Here are some of those workflows: Secure messaging; Lab results delivery including accumulation of results that are delivered in multiple parts. These workflows are easily deployable on the LabHIN.

The HealthUnity solution delivers extraordinary value to the following participants.

Labs (Independent as well as labs owned and/or run by an IDN or Hospital)

• Reduce costs and increase speed by disseminating information such as lab results electronically to ordering providers.
• Increase your stature and connectivity with your base of Physicians while still helping comply with applicable anti-kickback and Stark laws
• Increase utilization of the technology by “pushing” machine readable information to your community of physicians rather than they having to come and log in to your web portal
• Improve the quality of care of your patients by contributing your portion of data to the longitudinal clinical record of the patient
• Reduce your cost of technology by building a point to multi point solution rather than a “one-off” point-to-point integration solution
• For a low up front investment you will be able to try a regional network approach to data sharing. Build incrementally from those early successes
• Increase efficiency and reduce costs by electronically distributing result information to ordering physicians
• Improve customer experience by ensuring result information is made available to ordering physicians as soon as it is generated
• Reduce the probability of double specimen draws or repeat patient inconveniencing (e.g. pre-exam dietary restrictions, administration of barium etc) by electronically fulfilling requests for past study findings
• Reduce the risk of rejection of insurance claims because of a test that was repeated

Physician Practices

• Improve efficiency and save costs by adopting electronic collaboration methods for receiving results etc
• Incorporate electronic data into patient records without complex manual processes
• Begin to see the true value that your investment in EMRs and PMS can bring by securely connecting to the network and receiving lab results

Patients

• Streamlined experience at practices both at check-in, referral, treatment, follow on care…
• Speed of results availability will translate to quicker reaction time to adverse results
• Patients will benefit by improving quality of care improvements
• Prioritization of abnormal results over normal results will help decrease turnaround time and translate to better care