HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO

HealthVantics is the health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability services provider for Rochester RHIO (Regional Health Information Organization). Rochester RHIO is a non-profit, community-run, nationally recognized HIE. A fully accredited Qualified Entity (QE) of the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), Rochester RHIO provides HIE services to authorized physicians and physician groups, hospitals, health plans, and community‑based organizations in 13 upstate counties. The HIE offers participants a number of services, including integration, a clinical query portal, advanced alerting, Direct messaging, and more.

With an increasingly complex healthcare landscape and a community of HIE participants demanding more agile onboarding and faster delivery, the decision makers at HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO recognized that improvements needed to be made to their existing services.

“It was taking as many as four to six months to onboard new participants in the RHIO,” said Ramesh Sridharan, executive vice president and chief information officer, HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO. “In order to meet the increased expectations of our stakeholders, streamline internal processes, and keep our clients’ confidence, we needed to make infrastructure changes.”

The organizations decided that their next platform would be a best-of-breed solution, which would help them avoid being tied to a single vendor, as well as provide the flexibility to add new features and functions.

“An additional goal was to end our struggles with service scalability and double the participants using results delivery through the HIE,” said Sridharan. “The new solution would not only have to accommodate the increase in demand that would come as a result of the community’s awareness of the RHIO’s enhanced onboarding speeds—it would have to be capable of processing the millions of additional messages that would naturally result from the expanding data integration needs of the community.”

Recognizing the need to offer expanded service levels and accommodate the HIE’s growth, HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO chose Rhapsody Integration Engine—a proven high-performance solution for the reliable exchange and acquisition of health data—as the interface engine for their best-of-breed solution stack. This cost-effective integration engine enables its users to quickly onboard new participants and various EMR vendors’ solutions, facilitates the delivery of millions of messages per month, adapts to the latest healthcare industry changes, and more.

The implementation of Rhapsody kicked off a new era of growth for the organization, and today, Rhapsody serves as the foundation of a best-of-breed platform that drives the services HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO provide to the community. “With Rhapsody, we are now able to build interfaces within our own data center, without having to rely on a third-party vendor. That means we now have the ability to onboard new participants in just a few weeks,” said Sridharan.

This speed and functionality enables HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO to connect and exchange health information more quickly with the HIE’s authorized participants and over 35 EMRs from various vendors.

“We have some 15 million messages—both inbound and outbound—flowing through Rhapsody every month, and because we are constantly adding new sources and consumers of data to the system, this number will only continue to grow,” said Sridharan.

After Rhapsody gave HealthVantics and Rochester RHIO the ability to achieve that level of service scalability and provide new services to the organizations’ participants in a timely fashion, noted Sridharan, the number of participants using results delivered by the HIE more than doubled.

“We have over 200 interfaces and more than 1,000 routes running through Rhapsody,” said Sridharan. “We can closely monitor the operational efficiency of our data exchange while effectively managing all inbound/outbound interface activities. The value these capabilities bring to a small, non-profit entity like Rochester RHIO cannot be overstated. With Rhapsody, we are able to streamline, monitor, and manage our critical data exchange infrastructure on a day-to-day basis, which allows the HIE to share clinical information across institutions and practices and makes patient information readily available at the point of care. We are very happy that we made the decision to have Rhapsody Integration Engine as part of our solution stack.”