Customer Stories: Wisconsin Health Information Exchange

Connecting Care

As we continue to maximize the potential of Amalga, and how it will help us tackle our healthcare challenges and the use of electronic health information in our community, the sky is the limit. We have really just started, and it is an exciting ride.

- Kim R. Pemble, Executive Director, WHIE

Customer Story

Connecting Care Across the Ecosystem

See how Wisconsin Health Information Exchange uses Amalga UIS to tackle healthcare challenges.

The Wisconsin Health Information Exchange’s (WHIE) ED Linking Project is currently aggregating data across more than a dozen area hospitals and more than 100 community clinics to make it available in the emergency departments of participating hospitals. Microsoft Amalga is the data platform for exchange, freeing up information from multiple data systems across corporate boundaries and delivering secure, accurate, timely health information in an easy-to-use environment. Amalga has been rapidly adopted into the routine workflow of the physicians, and as a result, participating hospitals are realizing improved quality and reduced costs.

Q: How are you using Amalga at WHIE?
Pemble: Amalga allows us to seamlessly and in a very timely manner bring real-time information from clinical settings, as well as claims information, from the state into a concise collection of information while enabling participating organizations to maintain “ownership” of their information at the source organization. So while we are centralizing information in Amalga, data from participating organizations is not co-mingled.

Q: Are you making other use of the data beyond real-time availability in the ED?
Pemble: Yes, in addition to that primary data use, we de-identify the data within Amalga, which allows us to make that information available in a public health setting. Public health then can use this data to help support their public health surveillance activities. The public health use is a critical value-add to the way we have approached solving this health information exchange challenge here in the Milwaukee area with Amalga.

Q: How do you envision your use of Amalga evolving?
Pemble: We have recently added Medicaid pharmacy claims data through the Wisconsin Department of Health services in Amalga. This prescription history information is a big value-add for clinicians using WHIE. We are also indicating HMO enrollment and associated primary care physician, when known, for Medicaid patients. Later this year, we will also be adding encounter claims.

Q: What makes Amalga unique?
Pemble: The advantage of Amalga is that WHIE can function regardless of which set of standards the different healthcare organizations may be using to communicate their information. A standard joke in healthcare is that one of the nice things about healthcare standards is that there are so many to choose from. That’s really very true. With Amalga, I have the flexibility and the tools to take any set of transactions and create data views that we need to see to accomplish the goals that we have for WHIE.

Q: How necessary is it to have this connected view? Do you find that a lot of patients go to multiple hospitals in the same community?
Pemble: I never before had such an appreciation for how often people go to many different facilities for healthcare, particularly emergency departments. We would always ask patients about their previous experiences and they would do their best to tell, but frankly patients can’t always remember. Or they choose not to remember. Having the past medical history listed in front of clinicians makes a world of difference in terms of integrating a view of patient history to decision making for clinicians.