Small Nebraska hospital has big HIE plans

The proposed federal criteria for "meaningful use" of health IT would require providers to have EMRs capable of exchanging clinical data with other organizations. That presented a problem for the small, rural Thayer County Health Services network in Hebron, Neb., which had an EMR, but not much in the way of clinical HIE capabilities.

The system received a $1.6 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2007 to help with converting to an EMR and in joining a regional health information organization. But Thayer County Health Services wanted a quick, secure way to exchange patient records between its 19-bed critical access hospital and five community clinics spread across the county. So the organization turned to Irvine, Calif.,-based Mirth Corp., which has a new product appropriately named Mirth Meaningful Use Exchange. With the software, Thayer County will be able to send information directly between its facilities or via the Nationwide Health Information Exchange thanks to the open-source NHIN-Connect gateway and, hopefully, achieve Stage 7 of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model..

For more information:
- read this Healthcare Informatics news brief

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