OREANDA-NEWS. July 05, 2013. South Georgia Medical Center is implementing RelayHealth's patient centered Health Information Exchange (HIE) platform as part of its strategy to meet Stage 2 Meaningful Use requirements and facilitate the fluid exchange of data between physicians and patients.

In the past 18 months, South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) has evolved from a community hospital into a four-hospital system that includes a 25-bed critical access hospital about 25 miles from the main Valdosta campus. The growth meant that HIE was critical to the organization's success.

"As our strategy to become a regional hospital evolved, we wanted to make sure we had HIE capacity to share patient data among all of our hospitals and physicians and, subsequently, among individual patients," said Bob Foster, SGMC's chief information officer. "That, in concert with the criteria for Meaningful Use, led us down this path."

Phase one of the project includes populating the RelayHealth HIE with the hospitals' information and making it available to physicians. Foster noted that fast Internet access will replace the current, more cumbersome, remote portal.

The second phase involves connecting five physician practices' EMRs to the HIE so physician orders and test results can flow between the two. More practices will be added to the HIE later.

The final phase involves a patient portal that will allow individuals to communicate electronically with their physicians and view their health records. Foster said the patient portal interface was a main reason the hospital system selected RelayHealth's HIE. "The navigation is much smoother than others I've looked at," said Foster.

"Some of our physicians are communicating electronically, but most are not. The fact that we'll have RelayHealth and a patient portal that their records can go into will make that easier, particularly for those who haven't yet adopted an EMR."

"As health systems move toward managing the health of populations, they seek electronic means of communicating with patients and to aggregate data for analysis," said Jeff Felton, president, RelayHealth. "RelayHealth's patient-centric HIE can help them meet their goals."