BINGHAMTON — The Southern Tier’s regional health information organization (RHIO) is adopting a new service model that will cut its expenses and move it away from technology it has used since its founding.

The RHIO, called Southern Tier HealthLink NY, agreed in September to partner with the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and use that organization’s Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) service model. The move could eventually slash Southern Tier HealthLink’s technology-licensing costs by two-thirds.

It essentially transfers Southern Tier HealthLink’s health information exchange (HIE) off a software platform from New York City–based Infor to one from Cambridge, Mass.–based InterSystems Corp. A health-information exchange gives authorized medical providers in a certain area access to patient information and medical histories in real time. Southern Tier HealthLink is in charge of building a HIE for Broome, Chenango, Tioga, Delaware, and Otsego counties.

Southern Tier HealthLink has been using the Infor software since the RHIO’s founding in 2005, according to its executive director, Christina Galanis. The software platform actually dates back to the early 2000s, when it was adopted by Southern Tier HealthLink founding member UHS, she adds.

“What we found ourselves with was pricing that was determined years ago when the market did not have as many competitive vendors in which to drive the cost down,” Galanis says. “And we were increasingly seeing that we could obtain this technology at a much lower rate.”

Southern Tier HealthLink chose to go with the NYeC’s model in part because it would save money on vendor fees, Galanis says. Five other RHIOs in New York use the SHIN-NY service model, giving them savings rooted in group-purchasing power. Southern Tier HealthLink does not yet have final savings estimates, but it could pay as little as one-third of its current annual vendor fees of about $609,000 once the new platform is fully in place.

Moving to a software platform shared by other HIEs in the state has another benefit, Galanis adds.

“We found it was to our best advantage not only for costs, but for our ability to have less expense in innovating new products and new functions,” she says. “We basically go to the vendor and say, ‘This is an emerging-use case in our community, we need our system to be advanced to do this and this.’ And they come back and say it’s going to cost $150,000. In this scenario, it won’t cost us $150,000, because we’re sharing that cost with five others.”

Implementation of the new software underpinning the HIE started in early October. Southern Tier HealthLink does not yet have a firm completion date marked, but it expects to finish in the summer of 2013.

“The new system will do exactly or pretty close to what we’re able to do today,” Galanis says. “And the value is, we’ve already started to collaborate with the other RHIOs on creating additional or new functionality to support new things in the market, such as Medicaid Health Homes or case-management functionality.”

When the new platform is fully operational, Southern Tier HealthLink should be able to send electronic health information to providers connected to exchanges from the other five RHIOs that use the SHIN-NY service model in the state. And Southern Tier HealthLink will be able to receive records from those providers as well.

At a yet-to-be-determined point, the state’s other HIEs, those that do not use the SHIN-NY service model, will be able to link their existing software platforms to the rest of the network, according to Galanis. Patient consent will be required before a provider can view transferred health information, she says.

The other exchanges currently using the SHIN-NY service model are the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange, the E-Health Network of Long Island, Healthix, Inc. of New York City, Interboro RHIO of Elmhurst, and Taconic Health Information Network and Community in the Hudson Valley.

It makes sense for the HIE that covers Binghamton to be able to connect to exchanges in the New York City area, Galanis says.

“We have students at our university that come from Downstate in large numbers, as well as vacationers who come up from the city,” she says. “It would be advantageous for us to query Downstate if they show up at one of our emergency rooms to be able to get their medical history.”

Southern Tier HealthLink employs 10 people and is headquartered at 45 Lewis St. in Binghamton. Its budget for this year is $1.7 million. Future budgets are likely to decrease with cost savings from the new service model, Galanis says.

The RHIO’s hospital stakeholders fund it, along with health-insurance payers. Hospital stakeholders include UHS hospitals and Lourdes Hospital. Funding insurers include Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, Aetna, Inc., MVP Health Care, UnitedHealthcare, and Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan, according to Galanis.

Southern Tier HealthLink has connected five hospitals, 115 practices, an imaging center, a public health department, a mental-health organization, and two long-term care facilities. More than 138,000 patients have provided consent for their records to be transferred via its HIE.

NYeC is a New York City–based not-for-profit that works to help health-care providers move to electronic health records and set up a way for providers to securely exchange information from those records.       

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@tgbbj.com