Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange

Case Study: Dr. Weber

Data exchange is essential to enabling an electronic medical record (EMR) to achieve greater value. Connecting your EMR through the Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange (SCHIE) provides clinical professionals and medical staff access to comprehensive clinical and demographic patient data, improving the efficiency of care delivery for the patients in the community.

  • County Wide Master Patient Index with over 500,000 patient entries
  • Dominican Hospital
  • Watsonville Community Hospital
  • 10 Safety Net and County Health Clinics
  • 2 Outpatient Surgery Centers
  • Santa Cruz Mental Health
  • Santa Cruz Jail
  • Quest Lab
  • Labcorp
  • Hunter Lab
  • Santa Cruz County Lab
  • APMG (Pathology Lab)
  • Dominican Hospital Lab
  • Watsonville Hospital Lab
  • 5 Radiology Imaging sites – Radiology Medical Group and the 2 hospitals
  • Interfaces, both bi-directional and unidirectional to 80 physician EMR’s including McKesson Practice Partner, Allscripts Touch works, Epic Care, Office Practicum, eMDs, meridianEMR), and more under development.

Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange (HIE)

EMRs support efficient workflow and patient care management within a medical practice, however once the EMR is connected and exchanging data with the rest of the medical community its value can be fully realized. Connectivity through a secure HIE allows EMRs to achieve greater value through a bidirectional data exchange between the medical office and community providers. Information that previously was transmitted via fax can be directly deposited into the patient’s medical record for secure access by the clinician.

The Santa Cruz HIE can ensure that lab results, prescription refill requests and authorizations, patient referrals and specialist recommendations can all be directed between the EMR and external hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, radiology centers and other medical practitioners. The Santa Cruz HIE achieves this connectivity through the Elysium Interoperability Hub which is already integrated with the Elysium EMR-lite and the Practice Partner EMR systems.