Networking News

PatientPing Brings Care Coordination to New Jersey Healthcare

PatientPing opens up their network to New Jersey healthcare organizations with Hackensack Meridian Health deployment.

Source: Thinkstock

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- PatientPing announced its new partnership with Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey in an effort to provide patients with coordinated care. PatientPing hopes to bring full data sharing and interoperability across all of Hackensack Meridian Health’s 13 hospitals.

Connecting health systems from all Hackensack Meridian Health locations will allow clinicians to see when patients are admitted, discharged, or transferred to or from one of its hospitals.

Hackensack Meridian Health is the first healthcare organization in New Jersey to implement PatientPing’s data sharing solution. Other healthcare organizations in the state deploying PatientPing in the future will have access to Hackensack Meridian Health’s shared data and will be able to share data of their own.

Other states currently participating in the coordinated care network are Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Any healthcare organization in a state with PatientPing already deployed in one or more network can join up and start sharing its data as well.

Hackensack Meridian Health President of Population Health Patrick Young stated that the organization is dedicated to providing quality care to its patients and chose PatientPing because of the simple and constant connectivity the solution provides its hospitals, outpatients, and post-acute facilities.

The tool aims for transparency between organizations’ medical information so clinicians can easily retrieve the most up to date information on a patient when that patient comes from a different facility in the network.

Clinicians also have the option of leaving notes for future care-givers, along with contact information so the clinicians can better discuss and understand the patient’s conditions. The easy contact allows organizations to diagnose medical issues quickly and avoid unnecessary readmissions resulting in better patient care.

PatientPing stated that it is looking forward to expanding its care network in New Jersey as other healthcare organizations adopt its solution.

Healthcare organizations have been seeking interoperability and coordinated care for the benefit of clinicians and patients alike. Interoperability for patient electronic health records (EHRs), patient-centralized outcomes, team-based care, and care coordination is an area of health IT infrastructure many organizations struggle with.

Accountable care organizations (ACOs) require providers to work together in team-based care environments to improve patient health across multiple care facilities including primary care, emergency care, and specialists. ACO clinicians in different locations can only effectively coordinate if their networks can quickly and securely work together.

The healthcare industry is pushing stronger strategies for care coordination and interoperability, beginning with implementing the right health IT interoperability solutions.

PatientPing’s strategy for interoperability is creating a separate network for healthcare organizations looking to exchange patient data among unaffiliated organizations. Organizations such as the Argonaut Project are trying to create a universal API to allow easy and compatible interoperability between healthcare organizations that do not share the same network infrastructure.

"The industry needs to evolve from simply exchanging information to meaningfully sharing it and introducing new workflows to access it," said athenahealth Vice President of Healthcare Transactions Doran Robinson. "We believe that efforts such as Carequality, CommonWell and the Argonaut Project are making marked progress on mobilizing health care information in meaningful and secure ways.”

The Argonaut Project is one of the organizations working to develop a FHIR-based application programming interface (API) and Core Data Services to expand the sharing of electronic health information. The goal of the Argonaut Project is to “enable interested vendors and providers to develop and implement a focused but complete FHIR API specification, and accompanying security implementation.”

Interoperability solutions are looking to connect many organizations securely and quickly and vendors are going about care coordination in different ways. As interoperability efforts from vendors and healthcare organizations continue to be implemented, patients will experience faster and more accurate care.