28 Apr Reliance eHealth Collaborative Enhances Data Reporting and Analytics for COVID-19 Response

IMAT Solutions Supporting New Use Cases for Notification of COVID-19 Test Results, as well as Comprehensive Reporting, Standardization of Coding, and Community Information Sharing

April 28, 2020, Orem, UT – IMAT Solutions, a leader in delivering innovative, real-time, healthcare data management and population health reporting solutions, today announced that Reliance eHealth Collaborative, a growing health information exchange (HIE) in the Pacific Northwest, is developing and implementing a wide-range of use cases for enhancing its stakeholders’ COVID-19 response.

With next-generation data management, analytics and reporting from IMAT Solutions serving as the foundation for these efforts, Reliance is implementing five unique use cases for a more effective and timely COVID-19 response.

“Reliance serves as a valuable resource for facilitating the exchange of critical patient data used in the management of patients during this healthcare crisis,” said Erick Maddox, Executive Director, Reliance eHealth Collaborative. “Our team continues to do a tremendous job in working with our stakeholders to address data availability and quality related to COVID-19.”

These use cases span everything from notification of COVID-19 test results to symptoms and comorbidities reporting to patient demographic reporting to the standardization and normalization of coding and community information sharing.

“Reliance is playing a key role in bringing dynamic, health data-related use cases to life in response to today’s crisis,” said Kurt Garbe, CEO of IMAT Solutions. “These efforts reinforce how health data can be leveraged in innovative and expanded ways to help HIE stakeholders to best manage all patient-focused efforts.”

Following are more details about these use cases:

Symptoms and Comorbidities Reporting: Using a broad and deep clinical data set, Reliance identifies patients who have symptoms or diagnosis that qualify them as potentially positive for COVID-19. The IMAT platform allows for the rapid development of this use case through data aggregation across the entire community. This provides a wide-net identification that allows users to see, in one view, the attributed patient population that is displaying symptoms related to COVID-19.

Notification of COVID-19 Test Results: Thanks to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) search capabilities of the IMAT platform, Reliance was able to identify local hospital labs offering COVID-19 test results. The HIE now receives and aggregates these test results in near-real time. These lab results provide visibility into both COVID-19 positive and negative results, which can be displayed in Notification Reports that present results attributed to a patient population in a single view or at the individual patient level using the Community Health Record.

Current Patient Demographic Reporting: Since accessing a patient’s most current contact information is crucial during an outbreak, Reliance now aggregates demographic data, including contact information for patients from sources across the Pacific Northwest. It also makes available contact information from a patient’s most up-to-date healthcare encounter for use in follow-up care coordination and management.

Standardization and Normalization of Coding: With variations in medical coding languages and terminology services being very common due to the large-scale creation of patient data across a community or state, the standardization and normalization of coding can be challenging. Reliance now maintains a wide-range of terminology and codes that allow accurate and effective machine-to-machine exchange of information. This enables any hospitals or health plans to effectively see if a patient – no matter where they have been initially treated – has tested positive for COVID-19.

Community Information Sharing: The IMAT platform allows clinical information to be aggregated for patients from across the region and shared with clinical end users through the Community Health Record. Without the need for a specific EMR or access to any particular health system’s EMR portal, this web-based portal is available to outpatient healthcare providers at no cost and offers a longitudinal view of a patient’s care. It provides insight into hospital stays, urgent care encounters, lab tests, radiology studies and other critical information necessary to provide care and support for COVID-19 patients.

“Thanks to the IMAT platform, the queries and back-end reporting scripting in Python allow for very rapid development,” said Scott Tse, Healthcare Data Analyst at Reliance eHealth Collaborative. “It’s possible to quickly conduct comprehensive exploration of our near real-time dataset at scale for developing reports, enabling us to rapidly create these use cases. It also allows us to aggregate data on a regional level, and have two-way flow of information sharing, which is vital in a pandemic.”

As Reliance is rapidly evolving and iterating its efforts in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is also working to address additional use cases in the near future including:

EMS Notification: Using the Community Health Record, Reliance is working to provide Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dispatchers and users with home addresses or locations of COVID-19 patients where EMS response is required. This will allow first responders to ensure that appropriate COVID-19 Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is being used when entering a location to provide care for a patient.

Death Notification: Reporting on patient mortality following a diagnosis of COVID-19 or following identification of symptoms of the virus will support epidemiologist and medical examiners with their investigative work and will help support accurate and proper reporting of mortality rates related to COVID-19.

Social Risk Factors: Upcoming reporting refinements will include indicators of social risk such as housing or food insecurity in COVID-19-positive populations.

About Reliance eHealth Collaborative
Reliance eHealth Collaborative is a non-profit community-based health information exchange founded in 2011, originally formed by a group of hospitals and health systems in Medford Oregon to solve the problem of sharing data between their organizations and others in the region. Since its inception, Reliance has grown significantly and today has broad participation from the full range of health care settings to include behavioral health and social service organization throughout the Pacific Northwest. Reliance offers HIE services to include longitudinal community health record access, HIE integrated electronic referrals access, HISP services, behavioral health data integration and exchange and data analytic services. To learn more about Reliance eHealth Collaborative, visit http://www.reliancehie.org.