Union Hospital joins Indiana Network for Patient Care

The Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) is expanding to serve patients in Terre Haute and Clinton, Indiana. Union Hospital joins 60 hospitals serving more than 6 million patients throughout the state in a network that allows physicians to securely access necessary information to make decisions critical to patient care.

“We understand patients travel to receive treatment from various providers”

Launched in 1994 by the Regenstrief Institute, the INPC daily handles approximately 2.5 million secure transactions of clinically relevant data such as laboratory test results, medication and treatment histories, and other clinically important information in a standardized, electronic format. This information is critical to diagnoses, treatment and referral decisions and is now available to Union Hospital healthcare providers.

Union Hospital, a 380-bed community health-care facility with 2,400 employees, is the largest nonprofit healthcare provider between St. Louis, MO and Indianapolis, IN serving a broad range of patients from west central Indiana and east central Illinois. The INPC will fold Union Hospital into the nation's largest health information exchange in the nation, providing important clinical information in a standardized, electronic format.

The INPC is the foundational technology for the services offered by the Indiana Health Information Exchange. Today's announcement supports the growing partnership between Regenstrief and IHIE to bring the technologies, expertise and customer support activities of these two organizations to create a meaningful patient-centric health information exchange to clinicians in Indiana. This partnership provides communities, like those served by Union Hospitals with efficiency, quality and safety improvements that will help support even better patient care.

"We understand patients travel to receive treatment from various providers," said Kelly Mills, Union Hospital patient educator. "Joining this network enables us to access important medical information allowing our physicians to retrieve the most up-to-date and relevant patient data that is needed to effectively and efficiently treat our patients throughout the continuum of care - whether they've been treated by one of our physicians or by another participating healthcare provider."

The INPC supports IHIE's results delivery and quality improvement efforts, which includes participation from more than 60 hospitals and 15,000 physicians throughout Indiana. The information is aggregated in real-time, so the network provides the most accurate, up-to-date information about a patient, regardless of previous treatment location.

"By joining this network, clinicians in these two communities will benefit from securely accessing data from across the participating organizations, which provides better information for better outcomes," said Dr. J. Marc Overhage, President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange and Medical Informatics Director of the Regenstrief Institute. "This benefits patients by enabling their doctors to choose optimal therapies and avoid drug-drug interactions, among other life-saving and efficiency-generating efforts."