Data From SCL Health Ambulatory Clinics Now Available in CORHIO HIE

Six ambulatory clinics at SCL Health System are now sending clinical data into the CORHIO HIE, so community providers can access this information to better care for patients.

SCL Health System is now sending ambulatory clinic data into the CORHIO health information exchange (HIE) network (as of December 2^nd). This marks the first time a major health system has signed an agreement with CORHIO focused exclusively on enabling their ambulatory practices to become data senders.

Procedure and progress notes, laboratory results, and visit summaries from these six clinics are now available to any community provider who is participating in CORHIO.

The new data senders include Saint Joseph Hospital’s community clinics, including Caritas Clinic (both Surgery and Internal Medicine clinics), Seton Women’s Center and Sister Joanna Bruner Family Medicine Center. The community clinics care for all patients, regardless of financial situation or health plan coverage. Two outpatient departments of Saint Joseph Hospital --Certified Nurse Midwives and the Center for Perinatal Medicine – are also sending in data.

Cherise Callighan, Director of GME Clinical Operations, was instrumental in getting the clinic data into the CORHIO HIE. “All of my providers agreed with me on this. Our main motivation was that all the clinics that care for patients should have access to each other’s records,” she said. “We share a lot of patients with other metro area clinics and we don’t always know it. And if emergency rooms can see our records, it could make all the difference. We’re all working to keep patients out of the hospital and we need to share information to make sure patients are healthier and getting better care.”

“We are thrilled the SCL clinics have made their data available to providers in the CORHIO network. This is a major milestone not only for CORHIO, but for SCL Health System and all of the healthcare providers in Colorado,” says Morgan Honea, CEO at CORHIO. “Healthcare leaders in our state understood early on how important health information exchange is, and we’ve all known that for true interoperability to occur, we need not only hospital, lab and imaging center data, we need transparency into care happening in the ambulatory setting.”

Positive Feedback From Community Providers

Liza Gamboa, Health Information Exchange Project Lead Coordinator at SCL Health, works on keeping the health system’s providers connected to medical records and HIE. “I’ve already had some feedback from our providers that they appreciate seeing our ambulatory data in there -- especially the progress notes,” she says. “This is a huge benefit for our community providers to get this clinic data. This has been a huge success.”

Clinics Part of Graduate Medical Education Program

Four of the facilities now sending data to the CORHIO HIE are part of SCL Health’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) program. Saint Joseph Hospital is the state’s oldest private teaching hospital. There are currently more than 100 residents in training among the four accredited residency programs in family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology and general surgery.

The Saint Joseph Hospital clinics are rooted in teaching and development of others and they brought this same spirit to the CORHIO project. “We’re hoping to lead the way and spark other clinics to get their information into CORHIO,” says Callighan.