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» MEMBER PROFILE
HIM Vet Helps
Psychiatric Hospital
Go Electronic
Julie Wolter
MA, RHIA
Diane
Drozd
RHIA
Hot Button Issues in
Health Information Exchange
Using solely electronic records sometimes
takes getting used to. Staff at Silver Hill
Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in New
Canaan, CT, is still adjusting to the fact
that—after their recent EHR implementation—all patient information is stored
paper free.
“I will have people call and say ‘I need the
chart,’ ” said Diane Drozd, RHIA, the director of HIM at Silver Hill. “And I’ll say,
‘it’s in the OpenVista.’ And they say ‘No,
the paper part.’ I have to say ‘No, that is in
there too.’ So it’s a whole mindset change.”
Leading the EHR Revolution
Silver Hill is one of only a small number
of psychiatric hospitals in the nation
to implement a large-scale EHR. The
hospital launched its OpenVista system
in February, an act that changed much for
both providers and HIM staff, Drozd said.
continued » page 5
continued » page 3
As the administrator for the electronic-master patient index at CareSpark, a health
information exchange (HIE) organization serving 34 counties in Northeast Tennessee
and Southwest Virginia, Susan Torzewski, RHIA, and her HIM colleagues work hard
to ensure that the right health records from different providers get matched to the right
patients. Sometimes she sees records with standard data element fields, such as the second
address line, being used to house non-standard data elements. That extra bit of information can throw a monkey wrench in patient identification.
“I call it jimmying the system,” said Torzewski, who is co-chair of the AHIMA HIE practice council. “It works for that particular institution’s workflow, and their users understand that information is non-essential, but when they send patient records to another
institution, that extraneous data may not be stripped out. Ultimately it can compromise
accurate patient identification.”
Patient identification integrity has become a hot button issue in the industry-wide effort to
create a national health information network (NHIN) that allows for seamless exchange of
clinical data between healthcare providers, government agencies, and others. HIM professionals can anticipate “system jimmying” and other kinds of problems and work toward
solutions.
The goal of HIE is ultimately to provide safer, more timely, efficient, effective, and patient-centered care. Regional HIE organizations like CareSpark are being formed to serve as
conduits for the data. A recent survey by eHealth Initiative identified 150 community-
