eLINCx to implement GE's eHealth Information Exchange across Wooster, Dunlap Community Hospitals

eLINCx, founded earlier this year to provide quality healthcare services to central Ohio communities, and GE Healthcare announced today that eLINCx will implement GE Healthcare's eHealth Information Exchange across Wooster Community Hospital, Dunlap Community Hospital and more than a dozen physician practices.

“eLINCx has a clear vision of improving patient outcomes by enhancing care team collaboration. eLINX will enable better information sharing, workflow collaboration, and insight - providing better information at the point of care for better care decisions.”

"GE worked closely with us from the start to understand our current and future needs," explained Carla Fonte, Chief Information Officer of Wooster Community Hospital and Chairman of the eLINCx Board. "GE's eHealth team helped us to translate our goals into an implementation road map that will drive short term success for eLINCx and the community. By sharing health information, laboratory results and radiology reports, our clinicians will be able to make more informed decisions at the point of care and improve patient outcomes, which is our top priority."

eLINCx will first implement GE's Health Information Exchange (HIE) to support physicians when viewing patient clinical summary data from across the provider community. The HIE will provide data to GE Healthcare's own Centricity® EMR, as well as non-GE clinical software products. The data will be made available directly in the various screens of electronic medical records (EMR), making it a seamless part of the physicians' regular workflow. When a patient's care is transitioned, the HIE will support an automated and digital flow of clinical information from one EMR to the next. This helps ensure a continuity of care across multiple providers and improves the patient's experience.

Electronic personal health information is subject to the same privacy and security laws as the information found in a patient's paper chart. eLINCx is committed to educating patients of their participation options and ensuring the secure exchange of electronic health information.

This first phase also includes giving hospital and referring doctors more timely and easy access to lab results and radiology reports, as well as an integrated referral management process. "Developing a seamless referral system completely within the GE HIE is another key element of our success," said Carla Fonte. "This system will help automate referral processes, reducing inefficiencies that cost time and money and helps to make sure that our patients in this community are not getting lost in the system."

Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare eHealth, added "eLINCx has a clear vision of improving patient outcomes by enhancing care team collaboration. eLINX will enable better information sharing, workflow collaboration, and insight - providing better information at the point of care for better care decisions."