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SYRACUSE - The Health Advancement Collaborative of Central New York (HAC-CNY) is preparing to connect prominent Syracuse-area health-care providers to an electronic health-information exchange (HIE).
With patient consent, the HIE will allow doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and labs to share information from an individual's electronic medical record.
HAC-CNY says it is a public/private collaborative of decision-makers representing the hospital, physician, business, and insurance sectors focused on improving health-care quality and reducing costs in Central New York. It first announced the HIE project in March 2008.
The organization is considered a Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO), which is a policy-making body for the HIE.
HAC-CNY has chosen San Jose, Calif.-based Axolotl Corp. as the vendor for the HIE, says Nancy Smith, executive director of HAC-CNY.
"They [Axolotl] will be developing the infrastructure that will allow data to be moved from one source to another," Smith says.
Under the system, a patient's data will remain where it originates (a hospital, physician practice, a lab, etc.), but health-care providers will still be able to access the system and get information on a patient for whom a physician has written consent.
Axolotl currently provides the HIE platform in Buffalo and Rochester. "So, they're familiar with New York. They're proven," Smith says.
The goal is to have the four...