Glendale Adventist partnership aims for better healthcare coordination across L.A. County
Glendale Adventist Medical Center’s recent partnership with a nonprofit group is designed to make access and delivery of electronic medical records more efficient for those in its network.
Glendale Adventist and White Memorial Medical Center — both part of the health system called Adventist Health — have signed two-year contracts with the Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services, or LANES, an L.A. County-based nonprofit that provides a platform for the exchange of electronic patient data among public and private healthcare providers.
The digital system allows participating and eligible hospital staff across the county to query a database for information about Medi-Cal and uninsured patients who may not already be in their local system for improved care coordination.
For example, if a patient had a procedure performed in Glendale Adventist’s emergency room and is later readmitted to a different emergency room in L.A. County with a healthcare provider that has never seen the patient before — the provider can then access the LANES network to search for data on the patient.
The LANES healthcare-information-exchange system pulls data from existing standard healthcare protocols that carry electronic medical records from local hospitals, which can include a patient’s lab, pharmacy and image data.
Patients must consent to having their data exchanged, and there is an electronic trail left behind on whoever accessed the data if needed for an audit.
Sharon Correa, chief information officer for Adventist Health, said the LANES partnership is a project that has the potential to help connect the community and provide the best care possible.
“It’s about making information available more broadly so that it can be used at the point of care to provide better, faster and less duplicative care,” Correa said.
Although serving all of Adventist Health’s hospitals, Correa said her focus is on White Memorial, located in east Los Angeles because it often oversees distressed populations such as those living in poverty or experiencing homelessness.
According to a statement about the LANES partnership released Friday, the support for better healthcare coordination will come with “a special emphasis” on underserved populations.
“To enable coordinated and high-quality care for patients in the safety net, doctors and nurses from different clinics and hospitals need easy access to each other’s medical records,” said Anish Mahajan, LANES board chair, in the statement.
Twitter: @JeffLanda
