Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

How Payer-Provider Collaboration Has Fueled Data Exchange in Pennsylvania

Healthcare Informatics: Philadelphia, not unlike many other major cities, is a metropolis with several overlapping health systems. Richard Snyder, M.D., senior vice president and chief medical officer at Independence Blue Cross (IBC), refers to it as a “virtual Venn diagram of health systems on top of each other.”

What’s more, unlike some cities where there is a predominant health system that encompasses a big portion of the population and can build its own health information exchange (HIE), Philadelphia does not resemble that, Snyder says. “It has a lot of health systems, so you have that issue which makes it complicated since they all compete for doctors. They are working on an electronic medical record (EMR) that the hospital uses and in some cases acts like a little like an HIE, but only for that system—not for others in the region,” he says.

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