A model for sharing and caring: "the most advanced regional health care information organization in the country.".

• Author: Held, Shari
• Position: HEALTH CARE

THE INDIANA HEALTH Information Exchange (IHIE), whose mission is to use information technology to share clinical information among health care organizations, has attracted national attention since it was incorporated in February 2004.

"We knew it was going to be a very important entity if we were successful," says Dr. J. Marc Overhage, president and CEO of the Indianapolis-based non-profit organization. "That also led us to be more careful, because we knew there would be a lot of people watching."

IHIE deploys and creates services for health care entities based on technology developed by the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute. IHIE's first project, a clinical messaging system, has been highly successful.

Managing information.

Health care providers utilizing the system send all their clinical data--lab results, x-ray results, doctor reports--to IHIE, which then distributes it to doctors and hospitals for a fee. Formerly, each organization faxed, mailed and/or couriered reports to each provider. It was a costly and inefficient system.

IHIE worked with five charter hospital systems in Indianapolis--Clarian Health Partners, Community Health Network, St. Francis Hospital and Health Centers, St. Vincent Health and Wishard Health Services--to implement its clinical messaging system.

"From the hospitals' perspective, it is a huge win because it takes a manual labor-intensive process, automates it and puts that information out in a repository where the physicians' offices can get it," says Don Keller, director of finance for Alverno Information Services, a division of the Sisters of St. Francis Health Services. "We only have to send the information once, and IHIE takes care of the rest for us." St. Francis is in the process of adding its Lafayette and Crawfordsville hospitals to the system.

The clinical messaging system is also a win for physicians. "Physicians with patients at multiple hospitals in the city have all their results, from all hospitals, in their mailbox at IHIE," says Keller. "They only have to go to one spot. And the results are all in a standard format."

Overhage estimates that out of the 4,000 providers in the local market, 3,800 are actively receiving clinical messages on a daily basis, and that number continues to increase as participants are added.

Ultimately it is the patient that will benefit from the clinical messaging system and future efforts in IHIE's pipeline.

"Right now the [healthcare] system is specialist- and...