Creating Interoperability with Atrius Health

Today, BIDMC and Atrius Health officially celebrate their collaboration - bringing together a large multi-speciality practice group with an academic teaching hospital for coordination of care, a focus on quality, and improvements in efficiency. IT is a major component of our work together. Here's what we've done:

*Any admissions to BIDMC result in automated electronic notification of Atrius PCPs

*Any ED discharges result in automated electronic care summaries sent to Atrius PCPs

*Any inpatient discharges result in automated electronic care summaries including medication data for reconciliation sent to Atrius PCPs

*All email between the two organizations is secured via TLS and is HIPAA compliant

*All BIDMC clinical data is viewable within Epic without the need for a separate username/password or the need to respecify the patient. We do this via RESTful protocols that transmit patient context, login credentials and access control information between Epic and BIDMC systems.

*All Atrius data is viewable to BIDMC clinicians via Citrix. Over the next year, we'll implement more automated methods following the standards that support meaningful use data exchanges.

*We've created a web-based automated census of all admitted Atrius patients including those in ED or hospital observation beds (pictured above)

*Atrius Case Management staff have full access to all BIDMC clinical systems

*BIDMC has provided all phones, networks (wired/wireless), desktop, printers, and seamless LAN to LAN VPN access linking the BIDMC and Atrius networks.

We've done all this over 60 days and have learned a great deal. The Atrius BIDMC relationship will be a great testbed for interoperability activities in our Healthcare Information Exchange and Beacon Community work.