Institute’s success is wave of future care

GETTING THE PICTURE: Rhode Island Quality Institute has been at the forefront of the 21st-century health care industry in Rhode Island through its management of CurrentCare, the state’s health-information exchange. Pictured above are Rhode Island Quality Institute data coordinator Jeff Richardson and supervisor Melissa O’Donnell. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
GETTING THE PICTURE: Rhode Island Quality Institute has been at the forefront of the 21st-century health care industry in Rhode Island through its management of CurrentCare, the state’s health-information exchange. Pictured above are Rhode Island Quality Institute data coordinator Jeff Richardson and supervisor Melissa O’Donnell. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

It’s easy to see why Rhode Island Quality Institute is an innovative company; a look at what it has managed to achieve with CurrentCare, Rhode Island’s statewide health-information exchange, easily proves that.
Since its inception, more than 400,000 people, or 40 percent of Rhode Islanders, have enrolled in CurrentCare, enabling providers to have real-time access to important information that follows a patient as they move from provider to provider. But according to institute executives, part of what underscores the value of the system lays in its exciting implications for the future.
CurrentCare first rolled out in 2010, after the institute was able to take advantage of a trifecta of grants that allowed the state to build the infrastructure for the information exchange.
“The health care system is not a unified system,” said Jennifer Bowdoin, manager for new-systems development for the institute. “We have providers from many different organizations who aren’t necessarily sharing information with each other in ways that are seamless, easy and automatic. CurrentCare allows us to collect information … and disseminate that information … in ways that are actionable and useful.”
Now, according to Bowdoin and President and CEO Laura Adams, CurrentCare has been used in hospital systems as a first wave of deployment, notifying providers when one of their patients has been admitted to a hospital.
But what the future holds for the institute and the CurrentCare system is greater than just this first wave. Adams said that the company is working to build systems to notify family members, for example, if an elderly parent is admitted to the hospital, or to notify providers if an emergency department inadvertently doubles the dose of a drug a patient is already on.
“The idea is much broader than hospital alerts,” said Adams.
The institute continues to work with providers to find the best ways to integrate the CurrentCare services into their workflows.
Adams said that the 100 percent hospital participation rate (excluding the VA hospital) in Rhode Island is part of what makes the state a unique environment in which to grow and innovate with this kind of exchange.
“This type of innovation couldn’t occur if there wasn’t a community conversation, lots of trust and a common vision of improving the safety and value of care,” she said.
Bowdoin is most excited about the implications the CurrentCare system has for empowering patients.
For instance, Adams said future iterations of the CurrentCare system could see in-home, patient-collected data being transmitted to providers as well as family members and caregivers.
“Right now, you are taken care of if you show up,” she said. “And we aren’t as engaged in the lives of patients day to day when they are just people at home managing their own health.”

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