HealthQuilt

The Health Quality and Interoperability Laboratory for Training (HealthQuilt) is a community resource funded to pilot a Health Information Exchange (HIE) for the Greater Houston Area. It has developed a pilot strategy to establish a “network of networks” around patient medical homes, e.g. community clinics, primary care physicians, ancillary services and specialists that provide care throughout our community. HealthQuilt focuses on four core strategies:

• Assessing informatics processes and automation of the medical home concept
• Implementing a patient-centered quality model using inter-institutional peer review and primary care-specialty telemedicine.   
• Overcoming barriers for sharing information among competitive health care organizations by extending information sharing activities for disaster preparedness, management and recovery for medical special needs populations.
• Establishing pilots with payers, government entities and community organizations for these targeted vulnerable populations to fund information management for quality and information management across silos of care during routine and emergency situations.     

Central to these strategies is HealthQuilt’s web based, care coordination tool for the patient / medical home. Our Quality Health Record (QHR) was developed to support health information management and communication among sites where patients are seen. The tool provides:

• A platform for coordinating inter-institutional patient care and health information
• A secure messaging system between patients and physicians
• Embedded telemedicine for specialized care
• Capturing of routine and clinical quality indicators   

For further information, please click on one of the links below. 

• "The Medical Home and Health Information Exchange for Patient-Centered Quality and Preparedness"
• Medical Home Page
• Preparedness Page
• Technology Page