Chicago to develop largest metropolitan HIE in the nation

The Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council (MCHC) announced plans to develop the MetroChicago Health Information Exchange (HIE), which is expected to be the largest metropolitan HIE in the nation, serving more than 9.4 million people.

The new exchange will use Microsoft, CSC and HealthUnity technologies to drive quality care improvements and cost efficiencies for Chicago healthcare consumers. The MCHC recognizes the potential for HIEs to improve individual care and population health through selected technologies that support both goals. By enabling the flow of data across healthcare organizations, the MetroChicago HIE expects positive outcomes due to more comprehensive views of patient information. These include decreased costs from fewer redundant tests across care settings, reduction in time spent gathering information about patients and greater efficiency in identifying patients requiring ongoing ambulatory care. The MetroChicago HIE will use Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform, to aggregate and present a unified view of patient medical history data at the time and point of care, and CSC will provide project management, implementation, hosting and support services. Software components from HealthUnity will work in combination with Amalga to provide foundational HIE services and continuity of care document exchange services. These technologies will give the MetroChicago HIE a powerful engine to quickly aggregate and analyze data across patient cohorts and populations, enabling care transformation.