CommonWell Health Alliance is taking the next step in applying the broad scope of our connections by offering a key service that notifies providers of significant patient events.

The event notification service will start with notifications to care providers, designed to help providers deliver consistent care for patients as they move across the care continuum, and will be demonstrated at the 2019 HIMSS Interoperability Showcase.

The first phase of this service notifies subscribed providers when a patient interacts with an acute care provider. All admissions, transfers and/or discharges trigger a notification to be sent to any subscribed care provider who has an existing relationship with the patient. The notification includes the type of event and the name and location of the acute care provider as well as the date and time of the event. When any of the above events occur, this service notifies care providers that follow-up care is needed for their patient. Transition of care CPT® codes used for this type of follow-up are now considered a reimbursable standard of care, so not only do notifications help drive better patient outcomes through close monitoring but there is also an opportunity for revenue for providers acting on the notifications.

In addition to the criticality of this service for practitioners, the notifications are also a great help to patients as they transition from one care provider to another, especially in emergency situations. The strength of this service is the ability to provide notifications across the country. Imagine a child has a seizure during a vacation in New York and must be admitted to the Emergency Department. As soon as the child is admitted, the pediatrician primary care provider in Colorado is notified of the event. This allows the pediatrician to note the event and contact the parents for immediate follow up, prompting the parents to confirm medications, and make follow up appointments, as needed. Once the Colorado provider is notified, they can request a retrieval of the pertinent clinical documentation from New York through the existing CommonWell data query and retrieval broker service.

As the service provider, Change Healthcare enjoyed working with the member organizations to define the design of the service and ultimately, do the development work to further CommonWell in achieving its vision. The service uses standard HL7 messaging to support acute providers who are sending notifications to the CommonWell platform. These notifications are then passed to all subscribed providers who are linked to the patient.

Come see the provider care notification service demo live at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase Nationwide Coordinated Care use case.