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Shared Health Record Project Includes Community Health Providers

shared health record

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Are you a Community Healthcare Provider in Alberta?

The Alberta Netcare project, the provincial electronic health record (EHR), has been in development since 1999.  The EHR is a secure and confidential electronic system of Alberta patient health information. The Shared Health Record Project is one of the latest Netcare initiatives.

One of the largest source of patient health information resides with community healthcare providers. 

The Shared Health Record Project intends to provide the solution to integrate information from a healthcare providers' office based electronic medical record (EMR) into the provincial EHR to improve the communication between healthcare providers to better provide continuing care and treatment to the patient. 

If you are a healthcare provider who believes that secure access to more patient health information can improve health outcomes, this article is for you!

In this guest author post, Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, provides an update of the Shared Health Record Project.

 

The primary goal of the Shared Health Record (SHR) Project is to establish a foundation for sharing clinical information between physician office electronic medical records (EMRs) and the Alberta Netcare EHR repositories managed by Alberta Health Services (AHS). The purpose of this integration is to support continuity of care and clinical decision-making.

It is well acknowledged that 70 to 80% of health services are delivered in community settings – outside of AHS programs and services. It was expected that provincial availability of information captured within physician office EMRs would support continuity of care and enhance patient safety by providing a more complete electronic health record (EHR).

The primary focus of SHR is on enabling system-to-system integration to access to information held in the Netcare EHR repositories managed by AHS and currently only available via the Netcare Portal.

Note this integration does not replace eDelivery of reports delivered to physicians who are named on the report.

The SHR implementation will:

  • Enable authorized users to search for, view, and download clinical documents (e.g. discharge summaries, consult reports, diagnostic imaging reports) and encounters via system-to-system messaging.
  • Include capabilities to automatically propagate report updates to providers who had downloaded and replicated copies of reports in their EMR (or paper chart) or requested receiving updates. The propagation of updates is to eliminate potential impact to patient safety of using incorrect or out-of-date information for clinical decision making.
  • Honor the patient’s expressed wishes for a Global Person-Level Mask (GPLM) and require users to provide a reason for unmasking the record if they wish to access a masked record.

The scope of the project includes implementation with a limited production rollout (LPR) of clinics that use the Alberta Qualified Services Provider (QSP) vendor – Microquest. However the SHR interface specifications will become an Alberta HISCA standard and be available for implementation with non-QSP (Alberta Qualified Services Provider) EMR vendors or other applications (e.g. Personal Health Portal).

The Shared Health Record (SHR) project is a key component of the Alberta Netcare Electronic Health Record (EHR). The SHR project is an initiative to further develop the value and completeness of the information shared within the provincial Netcare EHR, and enables further access to health information to support clinical decision making at the point of care.

The success of the Netcare EHR has been achieved by enabling access to demographic information, drug information, lab test result data, diagnostic imaging and other report information to physicians, pharmacists, hospitals, home care, and other health care professionals across the province. The goal of the next phase of the development of Netcare, as defined within the “Alberta Provincial Healthcare IM/IT Strategic Plan 2009-2015” , is to share relevant clinical information in addition to the information domains presently available within Netcare.

SHR is a concept that was developed by Canada Health Infoway. The Shared Health Record (SHR) is a mechanism for sharing person-specific clinically-relevant data not held in other domain repositories (e.g. DI, Lab, and Drug). The SHR is intended to hold a copy of subsets of information captured in the point of service (PoS) applications and should focus only on clinically relevant data appropriate for sharing. The following are types of information that Infoway suggests maybe included:

  • Basic Encounter Information
  • Referral Orders and Referral Notes
  • Encounter Summaries
  • Clinical Observations
  • Problems/Conditions/Diagnosis
  • Care Plans
  • Care Protocols
  • Health Status indicators

The SHR completed extensive consultation with stakeholders and established the following consensus:

  • The SHR should initially focus on Encounters, Reports, Immunizations/Adverse Reactions, Care Composition Profiles, Screenings and Alerts.
  • Both data integrity (accredited source, accuracy, timeliness) and presentation (the manner in which information is accessed from within the EHR) are paramount.
  • Conceptually, the SHR project should endeavor to allow the EHR to act as a “summary profile” which guides and points to client information supplied, managed and accredited by other distributed sources. This profile may be based on Client/Provider/Site Encounters.

 

Guest Author: Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, Alberta Netcare

For more information about the Shared Health Record, see: www.albertanetcare.ca/SharedHealthRecord.htm and www.ahs.ca/connectcare .

If you are using an EMR, contact your EMR representative to discover how the SHR integrates into your EMR.

Alberta, Alberta Netcare, Canada Health Infoway, health care, healthcare, shared health record

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