A trio of health care organizations with Nashville ties announced Thursday that five entities in Chattanooga and Memphis will participate in the pilot phase of the Health eShare Direct Project.

The project is a statewide initiative aimed at creating a technology-based infrastructure that will allow health care providers to securely share electronic health records. It is spearheaded by the Tennessee Regional Extension Center, or tnREC, a division of Qsource, a nonprofit health care quality improvement and information technology company and supported by the Nashville-based Tennessee Office of eHealth Initiatives.

Informatics Corp. of America, also based in Nashville, is partnering with the project as a vendor. ICA is a certified health information service provider, which is a required component of the project. Qsource is headquartered in Memphis, but has an office in Nashville.

Participants include HealthSouth Chattanooga Rehabilitation Hospital, Erlanger Health System, Southeast Tennessee Area Agency on Aging and Disability and Home Health Care of East Tennessee, Inc. and Hospice, all of which are based in Chattanooga. Also included is Health Choice, LLC, a Memphis-based joint venture between MetroCare Physicians and Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare that has developed a patient-centered medical home model for the Mid-South region.

“We are eager to work with Qsource to begin establishing an effective and secure method to share health information,” Mitch Graves, CEO of Health Choice, said in a release. “In an era where healthcare spending is under the microscope, we want to ensure providers can always offer high-quality care while reducing costs.”

The pilot program will last three months.
 

In a deal officials say will cover nearly a third of the land mass of Michigan, the Upper Peninsula Health Information Exchange has reached an agreement with Nashville-based Informatics Corp. of America to use the latter's CareAlign CareExchange platform to bridge communications among UPHIE’s disparate entities beginning with the group’s ambulatory care centers and hospitals.

ICA’s communications program allows direct messaging, standards-based secure clinical communications and data exchange, according to a presser linked here. The market value of the agreement isn’t known. UPHIE has 300,000 members, covers more than 16,400 square miles and is home to more than 900 medical and ancillary providers.

ICA partner AlliedHIE has been awarded a coveted Health Information Service Provider (HISP) certification in Pennsylvania and, according to the announcement, a large thanks goes to the Nashville company.

Receiving a HISP certification is critical to becoming a participant in advancing the State eHealth Collaborative Strategic Plan. With HISP certification, AlliedHIE is also grant-eligible for several opportunities to help advance health IT initiatives in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. AlliedHIE is a nationwide health information exchange (HIE) leading secure clinical messaging "DIRECT/HISP" pilot projects in Pennsylvania.

"We are very pleased to announce that AlliedHIE has received the HISP certification from the Pennsylvania eHealth Collaborative," said Kelly Lewis, president and chief executive officer of AlliedHIE. "ICA is our technology partner in this venture and this dynamic relationship is already paying dividends. Certainly, this HISP certification is very important for AlliedHIE and for our goal to play a significant role in advancing health IT across Pennsylvania and the nation."

Informatics Corp. of America has contracted with a Virginia hospital to help the facility improve its interoperability. Chesapeake Regional Medical Center serves a market with a population of about 650,000 and handled more than 133,000 patient visits in 2011.

Chesapeake Regional Medical Center has more than 700 credentialed physicians who practice at the organization’s anchor facility, Chesapeake General Hospital, as well as an ambulatory surgery center, two sleep labs, an urgent care facility, a physician practice group and one home health care facility. Currently installed information systems to which ICA is connecting include McKesson Horizon for lab, Philips Stentor for radiology and Siemens Envision for ADT.