Northwell, Mount Sinai connect to the nation’s largest public HIE to build on population health efforts

Two of New York's most prominent health systems have connected with the largest public health information exchange (HIE) in the country to advance population health initiatives across the state.

Mount Sinai Health System and Northwell Health have integrated their homegrown HIEs with Healthix, allowing the public HIE to pull in a richer data set from two of the largest providers in the state, according to an announcement.

Meanwhile, clinicians at Northwell and Mount Sinai will be able to see profiles of 16 million patients and information from providers, insurance plans and pharmacies throughout the state, including information housed in the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY).

RELATED: Widespread use of HIEs would save Medicare $63M

“Connecting our information systems with others was challenging with traditional interfaces, and ongoing maintenance was expensive; we had more than 40 interfaces to manage,” Vish Anantraman, M.D., chief information architect at Northwell Health, said in a release. “Now with just one interface, we can easily send all the data from our systems to Healthix and the SHIN-NY, it is less expensive to operate and we have richer clinical data for care coordination.”

Donny Patel, director of interoperability and IT at Mount Sinai, added that the system’s insurance partners are already using the public database to improve care management.

Research shows that widespread use of HIEs would save Medicare $63 million in outpatient therapeutic costs by reducing the number of repeated medical procedures. Public HIEs have been declining over the last several years, prompting providers to invest in privately run HIEs.