VALCO: Solutions for Health Information Delivery

RHIO & IDN

What are RHIO's and IDN's?

A RHIO (Regional Health Information Organization) is a group of separate healthcare provider organizations located in a common geographical region that have enabled common access to patient clinical information in order to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare delivery.

An IDN (Integrated Delivery Network) is a similar concept, but refers instead to multiple facilities within a single organization rather than multiple organizations within a group.

While RHIOs and IDNs present different business challenges, the technical aspects are virtually the same and so we will only use the term RHIO from this point forward.

Why a RHIO?

Many experts consider RHIOs essential to the vision of creating a National Health Information Network. RHIOs provide participating organizations, as well as their patients, with a number of tangible benefits:

• Improved quality of patient care by providing private and secure exchange of information between organizations
• Increased efficiencies by eliminating unnecessary duplication of services
• Reduced medical errors by providing cross-organizational access to all of a patient's current clinical information
• Enhanced management of chronic diseases
• Improved public health surviellance and reporting

What is required for a RHIO?

A number of technical and business barriers as well as privacy and security issues need to be addressed to successfully implement a RHIO. Overcoming these barriers normally requires changing and adding to existing intrernal organizational policies, procedurs, and IT systems well as implementing new inter-organizational policies, procedures and IT systems. 

Some of these requirements include:

• Master Person Index (MPI) to uniquely indentify patients across organizations
• Database architecture and Data Repository
• Mapping of different codes to a common schema
• Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system
• Secure messaging services between organizations

Implementing a RHIO is a tremendously complex undertaking; beyond the capabilities of any single vendor.

Valco has extensive experience in delivering complex solutions to customers in cooperation with our long-term partners, which are some of themost highly respected technical and healthcare firms.

While the ability to aggregate updated information from multiple-sources is critical to a RHIO, the value of the information is greatly reduced if you cannot provide it to your clinicians in a usable format.

The Valco/DataGlider Enterprise Portal Platform was specifically engineered and has been further refined over the years, to present multiple streams of information from disparate sources to your users in an intuitively comprehensible and easily navigable manner.

To find out more about Valco RHIO Solutions click here or call us.