Adventist Signs Onto California HIE to Boost Patient Data Exchange

Adventist Health, a major faith-based health system, announced it has connected to Manifest MedEx (MX), California’s statewide health information exchange (HIE), to boost interoperability and enhance its patient data exchange across the state.

With this connection, Adventist Health gained access to longitudinal health records, real-time patient notifications, and enhanced data and tools for population health management.

The nonprofit health system will add over 7 million patients from 21 hospitals to the robust HIE that already connects roughly 25 million Californians across the state.

“Health is much more than a hospital,” Bill Wing, president of Adventist Health, said in a statement. “By joining Manifest MedEx, we are building our toolkit for serving as a health ally to our communities. Through this partnership, we can better focus attention on the people who need it most, keep them safely home from the hospital, and collaborate to build health and wellbeing for all Californians.”

MX helps exchange data between 120 hospitals, 700 ambulatory care sites, seven health plans, 13 EMS providers, and six California EMS agencies. The HIE aims to help its customers boost patient care and reduce costs.

Manifest MedEx delivers real-time admit, discharge, and transfer (ADT) notifications to healthcare organizations and up to seven years of searchable patient medical history to improve clinical decision making, patient care delivery, and hospital savings.

ADT notifications can reduce hospital readmissions by informing care teams about a patient’s condition and status as they move across the care continuum.

Adventist Health cares for a high number of underserved and high-risk elderly patients in small and rural areas of California.

It also recently launched a 150-bed virtual hospital during COVID-19.

“Adventist Health’s commitment to creating health and wellbeing is tremendously inspiring,” said Claudia Williams, CEO of MX. “We’re honored to help them achieve their goals of better care and healthier communities through connected healthcare.”

Due to natural disasters and COVID-19 in the country’s most populated state, the need for a robust health data exchange proved crucial in 2020.

The need for a robust health data exchange proved crucial as California healthcare organizations stared down three crucial public health emergencies this past year. These crises included COVID-19, the wildfires, and the state preparing to be a more equitable healthcare system where Medicaid is the most vital payer, Williams told EHRIntelligence in November 2020.

“What we've seen in the last few months in California is a state that's led very strongly with policy,” Williams said at the time.

“We see the results of that in much lower rates of COVID and hospitalization rates in communities such as the San Francisco Bay Area, but also where we've really struggled to get the insights and data needed, including for actual testing rates.”

Since February, MX services tripled as providers understood the importance of patient data sharing during the pandemic. In July alone, Kaiser Northern California queried the MX network 400,000 times, Sutter Health queried the system 250,000 times, and University of California San Francisco queried the network 200,000 times.

As seen with the addition of Adventist, Williams said she wants to help eliminate the remaining “white space” in the state, which would have a similar impact as geographic expansion.

“I want to see everybody coming to the table and participating,” Williams said.