Utilizing a health information exchange to facilitate COVID-19 VA primary care follow-up for Veterans diagnosed in the community.

The use of alerts from the Bronx RHIO, a health information exchange (HIE) to identify James J. Peters VAMC patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in the community was described to facilitate COVID-19 VA primary care follow-up. COVID-19 hospitalization and testing alerts were delivered on a Bronx RHIO facility report. VA COVID-19 follow-up care by telephone and video was guided by local COVID-19 clinical pathways, electronic health record (EHR) templates, and tracking through a database. VA received 180 RHIO alerts for 111 unique patients, and 88 had positive non-VA testing from March to June 2020. 41% of the 88 had non-VA admissions and 23% died. 63% received VA primary care follow-up of COVID-19 symptoms documented by custom EHR templates. The HIE identified 11% of the facility COVID-19 patients. HIE alerts can be used to identify facility COVID-19 patients diagnosed in the community and facilitate follow-up by their VA primary care teams.
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association 2019. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.)