The Patient Centered Data Home (PCDH) is an initiative of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) that is designed to enable the sharing of patient information whenever and wherever care is obtained with a primary focus on the patient. Patient information is shared across health information exchanges (HIEs) nationwide, thus ensuring that any provided treatment becomes a part of the full patient record and enabling continued care and support for patients regardless of where they received it. To date, 26 HIEs are participating in the PCDH, with over one million patients served and three million data exchanges.
The PCDH provides several benefits for care coordination, including patient safety and improved outcomes, security, and improved interoperability for providers and administrators.
Patient Safety and Improved Outcomes
The primary focus of the PCDH is developing a patient-centered system, and a key benefit comes in the form of improved safety and outcomes through expanded access to data. Because the PCDH focuses on the real-time gathering and sharing of patient information, partnered providers have greater access to life impacting information, such as known allergies or adverse drug reactions. Additionally, the patient record provides for deeper, comprehensive, longitudinal insight into a patient’s treatment history, progress, and prognosis. Not only does the PCDH potentially speed up care—specifically when patients are treated away from home—but it also improves decision making and treatment planning between home and away from care teams.
Security
With any care coordination delivery model comes the need for security and privacy. The PCDH is no different. Local HIEs retain control of their own governance structures while exchanging data with other HIEs through ADT notifications. Furthermore, data is queried by the caring HIE as opposed to being pushed to all partner HIEs. Sharing relies on event notifications for individual patients as opposed to granting full access to the entire database of patient information. These policies allow for rapid information gathering while also limiting access to patient data to specific triggered events.
Improved Interoperability
Partnering HIEs benefit from a shared platform of data exchange. Additionally, the PCDH tracks data queries between participating HIEs to help identify cost savings through waste reduction and time savings. For example, the PCDH may identify where patient records are stored in more than one HIE or where queries are being made and returned thereby streamlining the data set and improving care coordination across the entire system.
The Patient Centered Data Home is one of many new delivery models aimed at improving care coordination for high-risk patients. For more information, see our white paper “Evolving Delivery Models Demand Community Care Coordination.”
