Orion Health - Solutions

Orion Health Delivers Proven Solutions for your RHIO
Patient safety is a high-profile priority for every healthcare organization. The recent Institute of Medicine reports exposing serious patient safety problems at every turn highlighted the vital role that information technology and data sharing play in improving the quality of care. There is now much greater awareness of the need for our healthcare systems to work together to provide more complete patient information to providers across the continuum of care.

The need is even greater in rural locales- which comprises over 25% of the US population. There is a serious lack of comprehensive, readily accessible patient information on individuals living in rural locales throughout the United States. Data shows that rural populations are in general older, poorer, sicker, less educated and have a perception of worse health status than their urban counterparts. Additionally, a significant number of rural patients are highly mobile, which further burdens the clinician in obtaining comprehensive patient information.

Rural patients who are chronically ill also have a high incidence of critical care and therefore greater costs. Better and more complete patient information coupled with increased patient communication and health education will yield improved patient safety, increase the quality of care, and ultimately, reduce costs and resource strains on rural healthcare organizations.

In general, all RHIOs have common goals that include improving patient safety and the quality of care by increasing access to identifiable individual patient health information. Gaining access to more complete health information more quickly and at the point of care improves clinical decision-making, reduces medical errors and unnecessary tests and procedures. In simple terms, the goals are to reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care. Building on this platform rural RHIOs can add further components such as community healthcare, disease management and improved claims handling to deliver proven positive rates of return on costs invested.

Delivering on the Promise
The promise of regional health information networks (RHIOs) relies on all healthcare stakeholders, including hospitals, group practices, payors, employers and public health agencies, meaningfully cooperating to build an I.T. infrastructure that supports the sharing of clinical and claims-related data. The benefits of greatly reducing costs while simultaneously improving the overall quality of patient care are proven and valuable.

While virtually everyone involved shares these common goals, getting a diverse range of health care providers and stakeholders to agree on how the goals will be realized can be more than challenging. The problem is one of ensuring that the common goals are met while also delivering tangible value to all stakeholders.

It's crucial that you select an experienced technology vendor who can deliver proven, robust, flexible, and easy-to-use solutions. Ease of deployment and lower total cost of ownership are the key drivers that will ensure your projects' success.

Global Experience, Local Expertise
Orion Health is a healthcare technology company that has been delivering healthcare information exchange solutions across the globe for more than a decade. Orion Health counts among its implementations projects for the entire state of New South Wales, Australia, for all healthcare providers in New Zealand, and the Alberta province-wide RHIO in Canada. Orion Health is a global health information integration leader.

Orion Health is currently implementing RHIO solutions with several leading-edge US States and Regions, extending the value beyond just exchanging information to managing the care of chronic disease through our Disease Management and Medications Reconciliation solutions.

Flexible and Extendable
Orion Health's standard RHIO technical architecture includes its Concerto Physician Portal, Rhapsody Integration Engine, and cWorkflow Modules such as Disease Management, Medical Templates and Medications Reconciliation. Orion Health solutions are flexible, and applications and modules integrate well with partner and existing technology, enabling your project to deliver using best of breed solutions.

Whether your project selects a federated or centralized architecture, or a hybrid of both, Orion Health's solutions can deliver. The same architecture and software components can be easily adapted to serve as a hospital's clinical information system if desired, delivering a consistent, easy-to-use interface for clinical users no matter where they are located. Health Practitioners having secure internet access to Concerto Physician Portal can access all the features, information and applications delivered by Concerto Physician Portal both inside a hospital and across a region.

Superior Technology
The key underlying technologies of the Orion Health solutions are an EMPI, HL7 - version 2.x or 3.0 - and XML - based messaging, SQL access to data in repositories, CCOW and HTTP scripting to enable access to clinical applications. Typical repositories include lab, pharmacy, and clinical documentation and encounter data, or Oracle's Health Transaction Broker (HTB), the Orion Health CDR, or a third party vendor's CDR The system is not limited to this list as the portal can interface with almost anything, for example single sign on to client server applications, unique application types such as Meditech, PACS viewers etc.

The Orion Health RHIO solution also offers capabilities such as messaging and data capture by EMRs. Physicians can request a specialist review of their patient using the portal and its built-in secure messaging service. Practitioners have the ability to download regionally derived laboratory results of interest to their EMR, and to subscribe to alerts and notifications when significant events of interest or results of investigations become available. Adding additional users is both economical and cost-effective.

Orion Health Delivers on Total Costs of Ownership
Orion Health's technology enables configurable regional exchange of healthcare information to improve the quality of care delivered at the point of care. The elimination of duplicate tests, unnecessary tests, unnecessary procedures and unnecessary occurrence of adverse drug events yield lower costs. Complete patient information, right on time, at the point of care, reduces risks and errors, lowering the high cost of mistakes and avoiding critical care when possible.

Integrating technologies such as Orion Health's Disease Management, Medical Templates and Medications Reconciliation can deliver further value for your rural RHIO project. Let Orion Health technology and expertise enable your rural RHIO to deliver value, quickly and cost-efficiently.