HealtheConnections and HealthlinkNY Enter Into Strategic Partnership
This September, HealtheConnections proudly announced a strategic partnership with HealthlinkNY. The goal? To accelerate growth and promote efficiency, innovation, and ultimately affect positive patient outcomes. As a team, the two QEs will connect providers from the northern border of New York City, through the Hudson Valley, and throughout the Southern Tier and Central New York to the Canadian border
The partnership is the result of months of collaboration following HealthlinkNY’s decision to seek a strategic partner in 2017. Staci Romeo, Executive Director of HealthlinkNY, said she chose HealtheConnections because their technological platform fit our needs, and the quality of services and customer engagement processes align with HealthlinkNY’s mission and values. “HealtheConnections has proven technology and associated services that create value for providers. We’re thinking progressively and looking to offer resources such as tools to measure quality and support value-based care systems,” she explained. “We want a partner with innovative services and an unwavering commitment to providing value to healthcare professionals by enabling them to improve care and efficiency, as well as saving time and money.”
Rob Hack, President and CEO of HealtheConnections, said the strategic partnership was inspired, in part, by a statewide effort to optimize costs and efficiencies to increase use and adoption of regional health information exchanges (HIE) and the network that connects them all—the SHIN-NY, or the Statewide Health Information Network of New York. “HealtheConnections and HealthlinkNY have a shared vision of using health data to create healthier communities, improve healthcare delivery, and deliver value to providers. This type of progress can only be achieved through enhanced collaboration and looking beyond the status quo,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do here—accelerate the great work that has already begun. The HIE works to its fullest potential when all parties, providers and HIEs alike, work together toward the common goal.”
Together, HealthlinkNY and HealtheConnections will operate a service area that covers 24 counties, more than one-third of the 62 counties in New York State, and connect 100% of the region’s 66 hospitals. To ensure every one of their participants can make the most of what the HIE has to offer, the organizations will place heavy emphasis on customer engagement outreach, training, and support resources.
HealthlinkNY will begin to migrate its current HIE infrastructure to HealtheConnections’ platform in early 2019. It brings an expanded suite of services to its participants, including access to more databases, fully integrated analytics and reporting value-based payment support and advisory services, quality measurement, and more. However, this partnership yields benefits beyond enhanced technology. The breadth and depth of records available in a combined HIE will increase data exponentially, thus increasing the HIE’s utility to the community. HIE data offers great potential to support health system changes and prevention agenda priorities for the public benefit. It also introduces opportunities to share best practices and build on synergies in critical population health efforts.
Together, the two entities will be able to accelerate new participant growth, data contribution, development of new analytics, and community health improvement results.
To learn more about HealthlinkNY, visit healthlinkny.com.
