Kaleida Health’s plan to convert to a new electronic health records provider should ensure a patient’s information follows them to every setting within Kaleida’s system. But as Western New York’s largest health system shared its plan, Kaleida President and CEO Don Boyd kept hearing the same question about the conversion.
“Wasn’t that what HEALTHeLINK was supposed to do?”
To answer that question, The Buffalo News sat down with HEALTHeLINK President and CEO Daniel E. Porreca, who has led the nonprofit health information exchange for Western New York since 2007.
The short answer is, HEALTHeLINK isn’t going anywhere, and its leaders say it’s still a vitally important tool in the local health care industry, no matter which company’s electronic health record platform a hospital system may use.
Porreca said HEALTHeLINK supports Kaleida’s transition to a new electronic health record and even provided a letter of support to the state that helped Kaleida land state funds for the conversion. But Kaleida’s upcoming conversion to an electronic health record powered by Epic Systems in no way renders HEALTHeLINK obsolete, Porreca said.
It’s critically important that hospitals and health systems streamline these records because patients see a wide array of health specialists across their facilities and the region that utilize different electronic health record systems.
The first thing to understand, Porreca said, is that HEALTHeLINK has long been the regional facilitator connecting more than 5,300 health care providers, no matter which of the almost 40 electronic health record systems present in Western New York they use. A health information exchange, such as HEALTHeLINK, taps into various electronic health records, health systems and other providers to ensure a patient’s health data is available when and where it’s needed.
Providers participating with HEALTHeLINK can look up a patient’s clinical record – patients must fill out a HEALTHeLINK patient consent form – and obtain lab results, radiology reports and medication history from various electronic health records across the community. In 2024, providers conducted nearly 12.3 million patient record lookups through HEALTHeLINK.
“If we just turn the switch off on HEALTHeLINK, what wouldn’t happen?” Porreca said. “Reports wouldn’t get delivered from labs to the provider’s office into their (electronic medical record). They’re going to be going back to printing those labs and faxing them. This is one of those kind of things people just forget about.”
So, Porreca said, HEALTHeLINK’s function is much larger than just connecting health care settings or providers that use Epic, only one of many electronic health records providers used in Western New York. For Kaleida, converting to Epic will simplify what the health system has today, which is 13 versions of electronic health records.
“Bringing those together, it’s important for that health system to make sure that the data flows seamlessly throughout the organization,” Porreca said. “What we do is connect that data to the rest of the community. So that’s the beauty, the magic of health information exchange.”
This concept of health data coordination is nothing new.
Let’s take a trip back to Jan. 20, 2004: the day of then-President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address.
Then, Bush announced a goal of assuring that most Americans have electronic health records within the next 10 years, hoping for a way to share patient information securely among health care providers. The goal, the president said, was to boost health care quality, prevent medical errors, reduce health care costs and improve administrative efficiencies.
Two decades later, getting more providers on the same electronic health record provider certainly helps in that goal.
It’s why around 10 years ago, Dr. Anthony Billittier and other health care leaders tried to get Western New York’s major health systems to choose the same electronic health record provider.
But when Catholic Health in early 2019 announced it was committing $135 million to a new electronic health records system through Epic, Kaleida was already in the midst of implementing its own $125 million system through Cerner.
By the end of 2026, major providers such as Buffalo Medical Group, Catholic Health, Kaleida Health, Erie County Medical Center and UBMD Physicians’ Group will all use an electronic health record powered by Epic.
“It makes a lot of sense; it really does,” said Billittier, chair of HEALTHeLINK’s board of directors and chief medical officer at Independent Health. “And again, I wish it would have happened years ago.”
But unless every health care provider in the eight-county Western New York is going to use Epic or one standard electronic health record, the role of HEALTHeLINK as a central facilitator will remain unchanged.
It could lead to fewer patient portals, fewer repeated tests and hopefully less repeating the same information to different providers.
Not only that, but the original mission of HEALTHeLINK has expanded beyond the core of exchanging patient health information.
Most notably, the operations of Population Health Collaborative merged into HEALTHeLINK in 2022.
That expanded HEALTHeLINK’s mission to include regional health improvement, leading to the nonprofit launching a data dashboard, HEALTHeWNY, that allows data to be viewed and compared at a county and ZIP code level. That dashboard provides insights on health metrics such as the prevalence of diabetes, high blood pressure, tobacco use and obesity as well as what percentage of the community is getting screened for breast, cervical and colorectal cancers.
“I would defy anybody to say they have a better ability to measure patient quality of care, gaps in care than we do, and it’s not because we’re smarter than everybody else, it’s not because our tool necessarily is better,” Porreca said. “It’s we have the data, and we’ve been entrusted with that data to do the things that are in the best interest of the community.”
The HEALTHeWNY dashboard allows data to be viewed and compared at a county and ZIP code level, providing insights on health metrics.
In addition, Porreca said HEALTHeLINK is working on an artificial intelligence platform to sift over its data. That platform would provide an answer if someone, for example, asked the data how many diabetics are in a certain ZIP code in Western New York.
HEALTHeLINK also is working on a project to make advanced care directives readily available electronically to treating health care providers to ensure a patient’s instructions for medical care can be adhered to if and when they can no longer communicate their wishes. Too often, Porreca said, those legal documents may only be in paper form and not accessible when needed.
Porreca said HEALTHeLINK provides huge value to the community, especially compared to what it costs to run the organization. The nonprofit has about 80 employees and records between $13 million and $14 million in annual revenue.
“It’s a rounding error when you think about the health care spend,” he said. “And again, if we’re not bringing value, then we should be doing something else.”