Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County, a founding member of the Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange and Axolotl Corp., the nationwide leader in health information exchange (HIE) solutions and related services, announced a successful demonstration of clinical health information exchange with multiple communities using Axolotl’s Elysium® Exchange.

Taking advantage of recently released Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Connect software 5 members of the California eHealth Collaborative (CAeHC) including Santa Cruz HIE verified the ability to share patient clinical information among regional networks in California. Kaiser Permanente, Long Beach Network for Health, ER Connect- Orange County, Redwood MedNet and Santa Cruz HIE verified the ability to share patient clinical information among regional networks across the state.

The public test demonstrated how clinicians can better treat a patient within an ambulatory or emergency room care setting by obtaining critical clinical information from the patient’s electronic medical record from other HIEs.

This demonstration showed that any community based health information exchange (HIE) or provider network that conforms to the NHIN standards can securely exchange clinical information for treatment purposes. Providing physicians, hospitals and safety net providers with low cost access to data exchange technology is a key component of the Obama Administration’s goal of achieving “meaningful use” of electronic health records (EHR) by 2014.

For the past thirteen years, Axolotl’s Elysium Exchange solution has provided the exchange of clinical information between disparate systems for the Santa Cruz County community. Elysium Exchange builds a clinical network of physician practices, hospitals and other clinical settings, enabling complete interoperability between any certified EMRs or legacy system facilitating full collaboration on patient care. Physician practices are immediately able to exchange data with each other, including electronic referrals, and can also query for any available community-wide patient data, providing the entire community, regional, state or national HIEs with a complete picture of health for a patient.

“Using the commercially available Elysium NHIN Gateway, an authorized provider can view data accessed via the NHIN and then incorporate that discrete data into the patient’s medical record,” said Bill Beighe, Chief Information Officer of Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County. “The Elysium Interoperability Hub bridges the gap in that critical last mile of interoperability between the many certified EHR products on the market today.”

“Axolotl has been our HIE partner, continually evolving our solutions to meet our current health care needs,” said Marvin Labrie, Chief Executive Officer, Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County. “Our clinicians, at the point of care, are able to use patient labs, medications, allergies, radiology reports and more – assisting them in making quality decisions in a timely manner.”

“When this NHIN gateway becomes widely used, our emergency department physicians will no longer have to play a guessing game or waste valuable time and resources by ordering duplicate lab and imaging tests, or calling primary care physicians,” said Nancy Greenstreet, MD, Medical Director, Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County. “From any secure browser, physicians can quickly find a patient’s medical history, medications, specialty care, recent tests and procedures, and treat accordingly – in the ED this can mean the difference between life and death.”

“Interoperability requires policies, standards, and architecture. The NHIN Connect software provides a standards-based transport mechanism that connects organizations in support of meaningful use,” said John Halamka M.D., Co-Chair of the National Health IT Standards Committee, upon learning of the California eHealth NHIN Gateway demonstration. “The California eHealth Collaborative participants have been early adopters of NHIN Connect and I applaud their efforts.”

“Santa Cruz County is an example of a leading HIE. Their participation in the California eHealth NHIN Gateway demonstration further attests their leadership in the exchange of clinical health information to improve patient care,” said Ray Scott, Axolotl CEO. “This collaboration is a significant achievement and Axolotl is pleased to have provided the solutions to successfully link Santa Cruz County to the NHIN.”

About Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange

The Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange is one of the oldest and most advanced in the country. The clinical network connects more than 600 doctors and healthcare staff including a large IPA, two local hospitals, the County Health Clinics, two national and two local reference labs, two imaging centers and several FQHC safety net clinics. More than one million web transactions occur each month on the Exchange as well as tens of thousands of new electronic prescriptions, electronic refill requests, pre-treatment authorizations, referrals and transcribed documents.

About Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County

Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County (PMG) provides quality health services to thousands of patients in the communities of Santa Cruz County. With over 300 providers, 42 specialties, and 100 locations, PMG offers the largest network of independent Primary Care Physicians and Specialists in Santa Cruz County.

PMG’s coordinated care system ensures that consistent care and communication occurs throughout treatment. PMG’s award winning electronic health records (EHR) systems are a central component of that communication network. Affiliated physicians can immediately review preventative and chronic disease care history, make referrals, fill prescriptions and review lab data. To learn more about PMG, visit pmgscc.com.

About Axolotl Corp

Founded in 1995, Axolotl Corp. is North America’s leading provider of browser-based products and services for secure health information exchange and management. Its award-winning Elysium® Exchange suite of solutions enables health care providers to instantly share information, reduce costs, and improve quality and efficiency.

Elysium helps thousands of health care entities—including hospitals, health systems, regional health information organizations (RHIOs/HIEs), clinics, laboratories, radiology centers and physician practices—to securely exchange clinical information for more than 25 million patients. Elysium’s community-wide Master Patient Index, EdgeServer(s), Interoperability Hub (I-Hub), Community Virtual Health Record (VHR), and certified ambulatory EMR with integrated e-Prescribing are all provided as a software service (SaaS). Axolotl-employed U.S.-based transcriptionists provide high-quality medical transcription services, rapid turnaround and total billing transparency using Elysium technology for report delivery.

Axolotl is based in San Jose and best known for introducing Clinical Messaging®, now at the heart of all health information exchange. For more information about Axolotl, see www.axolotl.com .