HEALTHeLINK, the health information exchange (HIE) for Western New York, is advancing its collaboration with the healthcare community to further expand the ability to use its data to support strategies to help improve health, increase access to care, and reduce health disparities. As highlighted in the HEALTHeLINK 2022 Report to the Community, this next step in the organization’s growth is the result of last year’s merger of the Population Health Collaborative and the Regional Health Improvement mission into HEALTHeLINK.

“Over the past 15 years, HEALTHeLINK has built the infrastructure to securely exchange clinical data and help participating providers with the information they need at the point of care,” said Dan Porreca, HEALTHeLINK executive director. “We are excited to take our collaboration with providers, hospitals, health plans, and the entire healthcare community a step further by building on our current offerings to support public health, population health, health equity, and quality improvement initiatives.”

In addition to HEALTHeLINK’S work in addressing social determinants of health and improving health equity, a few of the major highlights from its 2022 Report to the Community include:

  • With support from the Milbank Memorial Fund, HEALTHeLINK conducted a study to examine if population health analytics helped to improve care quality and efficiency in primary care practices enrolled in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) program. Results showed that when HEALTHeLINK’s population health management tool and CPC+ are in place at the same time, practices tend to have significantly better outcomes compared with instances in which only one or none of the programs are in place.
  • Addition of new offerings to help drive efficiencies and improve the overall quality of care, including Emergency Department Summary Reports, which immediately generate specific queries for a predefined set of data when a patient has been registered at Erie County Medical Center’s emergency department.
  • Launch and expansion of new population health-related services to help create efficiencies for health plans and provide custom metric reporting and community research support.
  • More than 1.1 million clinical results, such as lab tests and radiology reports and images were delivered monthly. This marks a 16% increase over 2021.
  • Patient record lookup which enables participating HEALTHeLINK providers to instantly access a consented patient’s clinical record and obtain information such as test results, medication history, etc. totaled more than 8.2 million.
  • Finally, in 2022 alone, the HEALTHeLINK team worked on a total of 83 different projects focused on improving the HIE foundation and enhancing the services offered to its participants.

HEALTHeLINK also continues to collaborate with similar organizations across the state and country, including the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY) and Civitas Networks for Health, to leverage and share best practices for improved quality of care.

To view the 2022 HEALTHeLINK Report to the Community, please visit wnyhealthelink.com/2022.