Holon Solutions, a health tech company focused on easing administrative burdens, has joined forces with a Nevada health information exchange (HIE) to transform information sharing in the state.
HealtHIE Nevada is a nonprofit HIE that provides an electronic connection between the state’s physicians, hospitals, labs and other healthcare organizations. The latest initiative will enable care teams using Holon and the HIE to access precise insights at the point of care with the goal of improving care coordination and quality.
Nevada could save more than $153 million each year in healthcare costs when the HealtHIE Nevada network is used to its full potential, according to the partners.
When a provider has an encounter with a patient, Holon watches them with its patented software that integrates with the electronic health record (EHR). When a patient’s chart is opened, Holon can ask HealtHIE Nevada if there is any information about that patient that is worth surfacing to the provider.
“Because of our focus on the workflows of the practices where people actually get cared for, we’re able to find a nice way to serve the industry better, to serve the communities across Nevada better,” Holon CEO Jon Zimmerman told Fierce Healthcare. “We take work away from them so they can focus on providing better patient care. That’s kind of a win-win.”
A recent survey found that administrative burden is a leading driver of burnout among clinicians.
Not being able to access patient data at the point of care only adds to that burden, Holon and HealtHIE Nevada argue. Quick access to a patient’s medical history can potentially save lives, they said, and having that access can also enable providers to mitigate health disparities.
“Holon was a natural partner to move the needle for making healthcare data more actionable,” Michael Gagnon, executive director of HealtHIE Nevada, said in a press release. “We’ve only scratched the surface of healthcare data sharing, and we’re thrilled to continue doing this work with Holon.”
The collaboration also enables the transition of care management and can support public health officials in population health management and disease prevention, the partners said. Rates of hospitalization have been found to be lower for patients presenting to the ED who had their information accessed from an HIE system compared to those who did not. The odds are 30% lower, according to one study.
HealtHIE Nevada’s clinical repositories are available via an API. Prior to the partnership with Holon, providers could query the HIE to pull needed data, albeit in a comprehensive view that could take time to parse through. Prior to the partnership, it was not possible to query specific slices of data from the HIE.
“The idea is to take the information apart and pull out the pieces that matter at that point in time,” Gagnon told Fierce Healthcare.